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Heavenly Creatures Movie Review

Heavenly Creatures is a 1994 New Zealand period crime drama film directed by Peter Jackson and starring Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey. It’s a very overrated movie.

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“Only the best people fight against all obstacles in pursuit of happiness“

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It follows a relationship between two teenage girls growing in 50s New Zealand and the eventual murder of their murder. This movie was based on a true event that was sensationally depicted in media of the day and is still famous in this country. In my opinion, it wasn’t necessary to make this movie nor did Jackson do anything meaningful with this story. In fact, he did the typical excusatory movie on their horrible crime by humanizing them and explaining what led to that murder.

Even getting passed that moral grounds on which I stand, I simply did not care for this movie on a personal level, especially the characters for whom I felt absolutely nothing. I found Juliet simply insufferable. She is an arrogant twat who annoyed me to no end. And Pauline was just a deranged, disturbed soul who had no redeemable qualities whatsoever.

The movie is very interesting in their made-up lesbian romance that never happened in real life, but at least it gave some originality and drive to the movie. Their obsessive relationship was very well explored and it was the highlight of the picture. Whenever the two are together, the movie shines the brightest, but individually speaking, I found both of them to have been horrible human beings, so I simply could not care about either of them.

This was the debut movie for Kate Winslet and she excelled at portraying this insufferable woman. She was great and so was Melanie Lynskey, an actress who unfortunately never quite made it the same way as Winslet in the movies, but at least she got this one great performance under her belt. Others were also fine, but highly underdeveloped, and I felt horrible for the mother character who did not deserve to die being bludgeoned so many times.

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Heavenly Creatures ended on that horrendous note and an explanation that angered me. They got only five years in prison, which to me was criminal. The movie only became a psychological thriller in that last third, but it also had many imaginary sequences that were gloriously shot and quite dazzling and also disturbing. The film’s artistic cinematography and the treatment of the characters’ psyche and imagination worked wonders to make it more appealing and unique, but still the overall script and dialogue left a lot to be desired.