MUBI

Heavenly Creatures is chilling in every sense of the word. This movie is just incredible. To have early Peter Jackson, coupled with the introduction of Kate Winslet and the use of a terrific, underrated actress like Melanie Lynsky is all but a jackpot!! From the very beginning of this film, you know you’re in for something intense, and are not let down one bit. Kate and Melanie work beautifully together to create this intense, imaginative friendship where you can almost feel the obsessive emotions between the two. Their creative world is wonderfully explored by Peter Jackson and some very creative means of claymation and fantasy sequences, and you actually start to understand them a bit and almost reason with their way of thinking. You’re pulled in by their passion for each other and it is incredibly intruiging. As if this movie weren’t good enough the fact that the story is completely true, is just mind blowing. Any voice over from Melanie Lynsky is from actual diary entries of Pauline Parker during her friendship with Julie Hulme (Winslet). The ending is beautifully, brutally realistic and incredibly haunting. I guarantee you will not forget this film!

Peter Jackson’s best, bar none. Beautifully surreal yet frighteningly realistic and backed by very believable performances (agreed, Kate Winslet knocks one outta the park here). Plus, I’ll never forget how fast my heart was beating the first time that I watched helplessly as the girls carried out their methodical plan; that chilling scene alone was riveting beyond belief, but the entire film (in particular the slow burn of events leading up to the disturbing finale) is just perfect. Extreme hallucinatory sociopathy is as scary as it sounds. It’s a shame that the majority of film-goers who know Mr. Jackson for those LOTR snoozefests aren’t even aware of the director’s splatterrific and far more interesting film roots. Sure, I’m generalizing a bit, but I have yet to meet an LOTR fan (at least offline) who’s even heard of Heavenly Creatures or Dead Alive for that matter, let alone experienced them. But then again, I’m not that big on medieval fantasy epics myself, so I guess it’s all a matter of taste.