Heavenly Creatures is a 1994 New Zealand biographical film directed by Peter Jackson, from a screenplay he co-wrote with his partner, Fran Walsh.
It stars Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet in their feature film debuts, with Sarah Peirse, Diana Kent, Clive Merrison and Simon O'Connor in supporting roles.
Reviewers praised most aspects of the production, with particular attention given to the work of the previously unknown Lynskey and Winslet, as well as Jackson's directing.
Unlike the peaceful intellectual life Juliet shares with her family, Pauline's relationship with her mother, Honora, is hostile, and the two fight constantly.
Together, Juliet and Pauline paint, write stories, make figurines, and eventually create a fantasy kingdom called Borovnia.
Hysterical at the prospect of being left alone, Juliet experiences the Fourth World for the first time, perceiving it as a land where all is beautiful and she is safe.
When Honora bends over to pick up a pink charm the girls have deliberately dropped, Juliet and Pauline bludgeon her to death with a broken piece of brick hidden in an old stocking.
A textual epilogue reveals that Pauline and Juliet were arrested shortly after the murder, sentenced to five years in prison, as they were too young to face the death penalty, and released separately in 1959 on the condition that they never see each other again.
To bring a more humane version of events to the screen, the filmmakers undertook a nationwide search for people who had had close involvement with Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme forty years earlier.
Jackson and Walsh also read Pauline's diary, in which she made daily entries documenting her friendship with Juliet Hulme and events throughout their relationship.
From the diary entries, Jackson and Walsh perceived that Pauline and Juliet were intelligent, imaginative, outcast young women who possessed a wicked and somewhat irreverent sense of humour.
Jackson has been quoted as saying "Heavenly Creatures is based on a true story, and as such I felt it important to shoot the movie on locations where the actual events took place.
Taylor and his team constructed more than 70 full-sized latex costumes to represent the Borovnian crowds—plasticine figures that inhabit Pauline and Juliet's magical fantasy world.
Heavenly Creatures contains more than thirty shots that were digitally manipulated, ranging from the morphing garden of the ‘Fourth World’ to castles in fields and the sequences with "Orson Welles" (played by Jean Guérin).
The site's critical consensus reads, "Dark, stylish, and captivating, Heavenly Creatures signals both the auspicious debut of Kate Winslet and the arrival of Peter Jackson as more than just a cult director.
"[10] Owen Gleiberman, writing for Entertainment Weekly, gave the film a B+ and said, "Set in the early '50s, in the New Zealand village of Christchurch, this ripe hallucination of a movie – a rhapsody in purple – has been photographed in sun-drenched candy color that lends it the surreal clarity of a dream...
Gleiberman complains that Jackson never quite explains "why the two girls have metamorphosed into the '50s teenybop answer to Leopold and Loeb," yet concludes, "Still, if the pleasures of Heavenly Creatures remain defiantly on the surface, on that level the movie is a dazzler.