Heavenly Creatures
Heavenly Creatures
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.
Razorbitz reviewedFebruary 22, 2025
Teenage madness through the looking glass.
A subdued early work of Peter Jackson's compared to his usual fare up to this point. Having never seen it until this past year, I was entranced by the winding whimsical madness the film weaves. An artistic retelling of a very real murder that occurred, this film casts a sympathetic light on the killers and the opressive lives they were leading that bloomed into a cultish obsession with a fantasy world the two young girls find themselves sucked into as an escape from their increasingly oppressive families try to tear them apart. This film is gay as hell, but is neither the beginning or ending for what transpires and the banal cruelty of the act, nor the derangement that leads up to it. Taking from real journal entries that color each scene and the mundane horrors of the real world, the murder is calculated in only so much as they can rationalize under the vast anxieties of youth; and it is in this the film examines with all the horror and humor that I've come to expect with Peter Jackson.
Heavenly Creatures is indeed a heavenly watch; the cinematography sublime, the lighting soft, the wonderfully realized fantasy sequences as fun as they are haunting. The sense of forboding that permeates the melodrama of the two young girls so madly in love with themselves and each other plays out in an arc that could only be described as masterful, leaving enough to interpretation as to their motivations while making sure to underscore the reality their whimsy allowed them to escape from. I'm probably repeating myself because it's a really good movie!
My only lament with Heavenly Creatures is that the pacing is at times plodding, and at times the dreamlike nature of the film only expounds upon this. Not one I have any desire to rewatch anytime soon, but an easy recommendation to anyone willing to journey down the rabbit hole.