Heavenly Creatures (1994)
Peter Jackson’s film about two teenage girls who commit a murder in 1950’s New Zealand. The film was made somewhere in the middle of Jackson’s career path from B horror flicks to massive blockbusters and has considerable cult status. It launched the career of the fledgeling Kate Winslet and is regarded by some as his most interesting film to date.
The story is based on a notorious real-life murder, and there were several similar scripts floating about when the film got made, but Jackson’s real accomplishment is to take us inside the intensely personal world of the two fifteen year girls and show us just how the protective fantasies they spun around themselves combined with their unhappy family lives to result in a horrific act.
THE WORLD OF THE STORY
This is a film of layers and its opening sequence is a real tour de force in which fantasy and reality collide with each other and shatter. The dull, stock footage of New Zealand begins the sequence and then is torn aside, like a stage curtain, by the screams of the murderers (a hugely effective opening in live showings where the screams seem to start from the back of the auditorium.) The sequence then plunges into the dreamy fantasy world of the girls, a moment that is returned to at the end of the film.
The jarring opening is a deliberate and effective choice and it whets our appetite for what is to come. It generates a lingering sense of foreboding as the film then launches into the relatively sedate story of the two girls meeting at school.
For a more in-depth analysis of the film read this review from The Film Quarterly, April 1995 (PDF)
Scene 2
© David Clough 2010
Notes on: “The World of The Story”