HEAVENLY CREATURES Movie Review

The old “senseless crime” myth is hung out to dry again, this time with freshness and energy by Peter Jackson. Heavenly Creatures is the real-life story of two teenage girls—Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker—who, in 1952, rocked New Zealand by brutally murdering one of their mothers. The killing and the events that led up to it—as well as the sensational trial and its aftermath—are the subjects of this swirling and vertiginous portrait of paranoia, friendship, and romantic/sexual obsession. Jackson takes his theory of the girls' mindset at the moment of the killings and has constructed, from that point backward, a foundation on which their actions—while never seeming “justified”—are comprehensible. Melanie Lynskey and Titanic's Kate Winslet are remarkable as the girls, but more remarkable still is what happened in the aftermath of the film's release. The real Hulme came forward after years of self-imposed secrecy to reveal that she has been living and working under the name of Anne Perry, and is today a successful writer of ... crime fiction. As stylized and fanciful as much of Heavenly Creatures is, it never—even in its wildest moments—could have predicted a zinger like that.

NEXT STOP … An Angel at My Table, The Piano, Rope

1994 (R) 110m/C NZ Melanie Lynskey, Kate Winslet, Sarah Pierse, Diana Kent, Clive Merrison, Simon O'Connor; D:Peter Jackson; W:Peter Jackson, Frances Walsh; C:Alun Bollinger; M:Peter Dasent. Nominations: Academy Awards ‘94: Best Original Screenplay; Australian Film Institute ‘95: Best Foreign Film; Writers Guild of America ‘94: Best Original Screenplay. VHS, LV, Closed Caption TOU