Heavenly Creatures launched the careers of Kate Winslet, Melanie Lynskey and Sir Pete.
Based on one of NZ’s most disturbing murders, 30 years ago Heavenly Creatures launched the careers of Kate Winslet, Melanie Lynskey and Sir Pete. How does it stand up today?
Two teenage girls create a fantasy world together they call ‘The Fourth World’. Described as “heaven without Christians,” they enter this imaginary place to escape the depression and dull reality of 1950s Christchurch.
The Fourth World is a psychedelic paradise where the pair are free to indulge their passion for art and wonder. They chase giant butterflies across beautifully landscaped gardens of vivid hues and kaleidoscopic colours and act out the starring roles in an elaborate and intensely sensual medieval romance between life-sized plasticine princes and princesses that rivals that of any soap opera.
Despite how it sounds, the two girls do not take drugs to enter their hallucinogenic fantasy land. Instead, the intoxicating power of their combined imagination carries them there. The Fourth World is a heavenly place filled with wondrous creatures. But its enchanted pathways lead the pair directly to hell.
As recorded in 16-year-old Pauline Parker’s diary, June 22, 1954, was the day of ‘The Happy Event’. Her best friend, 15-year-old Juliet Hulme, came to her house and together they had tea and scones before going for a walk through Christchurch’s scenic Victoria Park with Pauline’s mother, Honorah.
The girls had come to resent Honorah. They believed she was trying to block their friendship and thwart their dreams of travelling together to Hollywood. As they walked along a woody trail Pauline took a brick wrapped in a ladies’ stocking out of her handbag, snuck up behind her mother and walloped her across the head. Honorah fell screaming and the pair took turns hitting her with the heavy brick as she cried and twisted on the ground as her teenage daughter and her daughter’s friend bludgeoned her to death.
The murder is one of Aotearoa’s most grisly and disturbing and even now, 70 years on, it has lost none of its power to shock. The girls were immediately arrested following the police’s near-instant discovery of Pauline’s meticulously detailed diaries and their murder trial became worldwide news. In 1954 Aotearoa, the death penalty was alive and well and only Pauline and Juliet’s young age saved them from it.
Instead, they were sentenced to separate prisons where they both spent five years. It’s said a condition of their release was that they never contact each other again, although the authenticity of this claim has been challenged in recent years.
In 1994, Peter Jackson was not the acclaimed and visionary director he is now. Instead, his reputation was that of a quirky fellow making low-brow, highly entertaining splatter films.
So when he announced that his next film would be Heavenly Creatures and that it would be about the Parker-Hulme murder, many eyebrows were raised. When it became known it was a sensitively portrayed, arthouse drama about an intense yet doomed friendship between two teenage girls those raised eyebrows threatened to skyrocket people up into the air. After all, his previous film, 1992′s Braindead, had been about zombies and the one before that was a sex-crazed, drug-addled, hyper-violent Muppets satire. Jackson was not a director known for his soft, cinematic touch.
That would all change with Heavenly Creatures. Written with his partner Fran Walsh, the pair debunked expectations of turning the tragedy into a gruesome horror flick by instead zeroing in on the white-hot, obsessive friendship between the teenage Parker and Hulme and exploring how that led them to matricide.
The movie opens with Juliet, a confident English girl, being introduced to her new classmates in Christchurch. She’s paired with the sullen Pauline in art class, where the pair quickly strike up an unlikely friendship, bonding over their shared medical history and love of art.
The girls find an escape from their authoritarian reality in each other, escaping into their fabulous Fourth World in moments of great stress, dark rage or sexual activity, and continually adding to their ongoing romance story through countless notebooks, letters to each other and in Pauline’s diaries. It’s notable how the darker, violent turns of their royal love story increase as external forces gather and threaten to pull their real-life friendship apart.
Jackson’s direction here is nothing short of revelatory. His camera has a dreamlike quality, softly romanticising his lead actresses and portraying them in stark contrast to their brutish surroundings. It’s imaginative with many angles and scenes that stay in your head as it floats and glides before effortlessly switching gears into horror mode for sharp jump scares when the need arises.
Jackson’s other longtime collaborator Richard Taylor was responsible for bringing the hyper-real Fourth World and the plasticine people of the girls’ imagination to life, and he does so brilliantly. Thirty years on from its release the majority of the effects still impress while the orchestral score heightens the film’s otherworldliness.
But most impressive of all is that Heavenly Creatures didn’t just reinvent its director as a major cinematic talent. The movie also launched the careers of Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey. Both are superb, and it’s obvious that you are watching serious talent. Lynskey’s stroppy Pauline is far less glamorous than Winslet’s fantastical Juliet but she provides the necessary grounding for Winslet’s exaggerated theatricality to fly. The pair’s chemistry - which was absolutely crucial to get right - is palpable and nothing less than believable, even within the softly surrealistic context of the film.
The film made a modest profit, received rapturous critical acclaim, won numerous international film awards, dominated the New Zealand Film and Television awards and was nominated for Best Screenplay at the Academy Awards.
All for good reason. Heavenly Creatures is a haunting film that stays with you. It’s dark and disturbing and strangely beautiful. Like a lonely walk through a solitary park on a brisk Christchurch afternoon in June.
Heavenly Creatures is having a special 30th-anniversary screening at The Civic on Monday, August 12, as part of the New Zealand International Film Festival. Tickets are on sale now.
Karl Puschmann is an entertainment columnist for the New Zealand Herald. His fascination lies in finding out what drives and inspires creative people.
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