Heavenly Creatures
Directed by Peter Jackson
- drama
- fantasy
The story
Precocious teenager Juliet moves to New Zealand with her family and soon befriends the quiet, brooding Pauline through their shared love of fantasy and literature. This friendship gradually develops into an intense and obsessive bond.
What it’s like
Saturated colour pushes against drab 1950s Christchurch: rain-slicked streets, dull brick and wooden interiors, and hand-held, restless camera work that tightens around two girls until the frame feels airless. Their private fantasy worlds break into vivid, stylised sequences of painted Gothic landscapes and animated figures, so the film shifts between grey domestic realism and lush, storybook excess. The score swells and drops with the girls' moods, and the soundscape is full of rain, clattering trams and whispered confidences. The pacing builds steadily, drawn-out and claustrophobic, then turns sharply harrowing in its final act. The violence is brief but brutal and hard to watch, and the sexual undertones are implied rather than shown. It suits a late, unsettled night rather than a comfort rewatch, and it is for viewers who want a dark, emotionally raw portrait of obsession, a mother-daughter rift and a friendship that tips into something frightening.
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