Peter Jackson directs Melanie Lynskey, Kate Winslet and Sarah Pierse in this true crime recreation of the infamous 1950s New Zealand murder by two besotted teenage girls who had entered into their own intense fantasy world. 

I watched this as a spotty teenage boy and was non-plussed by it. It lacked the illicit thrill of The Cement Garden or Sister, My Sister and was nowhere as hardcore in its violence as say Fun or Freeway. Nearly all those flicks are forgotten now, but Heavenly Creatures grows in my estimation with each and every sitting. I rode next to a girl on a train recently and wanted to tell her the Anne Perry novel she was reading was written by Kate Winslet’s killer in this… but she probably already knew… and who wants to be that creepy guy who strikes up a casual conversation about a brutal murder with a stranger. Winslet is great in this, her enthusiastic performance fuelled by huge dollops of Rik Mayall as much as anything else. All the acting seems to be working from a script punctuated solely with exclamation marks. There’s deliberately no subtlety in the reading. Except for Lynskey’s Pauline Parker. Due to her confessional diaries being a faithfully reproduced seam we learn more about her internally frustrated character than the other more enigmatic shouters and creeps. The narration isn’t all that necessary though, with a bite of a lip or a stroppy downward chin buried in a cardigan she speaks volumes anyway. The mutually created dream world and eventual violence of the kids are expressed with Jackson’s usual proud glee. He is no longer working on a shoestring but the deliberate shonkyness remains to match the girls’ handcrafted ambitions coming to life. I’d completely forgotten about a later sequence where a monochrome Harry Lime from The Third Man smirkingly stalks them around their bedroom but it is bloody brilliant. As a wider portrait of a repressive community struggling with intense teenage emotions it is accurate and sensitive. Jackson matures as a filmmaker before our eyes without losing any of his verve or ickyness.

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