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Heavenly Creatures is a finely tuned film that brings the audience close into the world of two young adolescent girls, Juliet Hulme and Pauline (Reider) Parker, in New Zealand in the early 1950s. The collaboration of Peter Jackson (director and writer) and Frances Walsh (writer) has created a deeply moving and intelligent script based on newspaper reports, trial records, and almost daily diaries of Pauline, and interviews with people that knew them. The script reveals a relationship that is innocent, imaginative, and obsessional. Shot in original locations, this film takes better advantage of the medium's capacity to visually represent emotional states than any film seen to date by this writer.
After an unusual introduction, this story proceeds in a seemingly traditional manner, starting with Pauline entering the halls of the actual Girls High School, reconstructed as if it were 1953. However, a second viewing reveals devices that enhance the mood: a garter, a dreamy fourteen-year-old. Then Juliet Hulme, a transfer student from England, enters Parker's ninth-grade school class. Bodi have to sit out physical education classes, and the girls become friends and share their romantic yearnings for fantasy, movie idols, story telling, and Mario Lanza. Each scene brings the girls closer together as special, exclusive friends.
The audience is also brought into the emerging early adolescent attachment of these two girls, which, exclusive though it is, in many ways is not extraordinary or even unusual for this age group. Both girls are bright and both have medical histories—Juliet with tuberculosis and Pauline with osteomyelitis. Their childhood illnesses have apparently encouraged the development of rich fantasy lives, and their time together is filled with