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Director Peter Jackson, whose three earlier features (Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles and Dead Alive) make clever use of puppetry and guignol splatter effects, here is like a physician who assumes a patient's fever in order to understand her illness. He visualizes the landscape of Pauline's and Juliet's minds as a fetid garden, where fairytale plots of courtly love and castle intrigue blot out their edgy lives at home and school. The girls' vision of Borovnia utterly mesmerizes them. Anyone who would break the spell -- like Pauline's sweet, anxious mum -- must be a witch. Must be sentenced to death.
Screenwriter Frances Walsh based the script she wrote with Jackson on interviews with those who knew the girls and on the bits of Pauline's diary that were submitted in court. As quoted in Heavenly Creatures, the daybook is a monologue of a fertile mind racing gaily toward madness. At first Pauline takes some blinkered notice of the outside world: "We have decided how sad it is for other people that they cannot appreciate our genius." Later, after the girls make love to their saints (and each other), she writes, "We have learned the peace of the thing called bliss, the joy of the thing called sin." And the morning of the murder, she notes, "I felt very excited and night-before-Christmasy last night."
The film's triumph is to communicate this creepy excitement with urgency and great cinematic brio, while neither condescending to the girls nor apologizing for their sin. The film's serendipitous stroke was to find Winslet and, especially, Lynskey, a first-time actress. They are perfect, fearless in embodying teenage hysteria. They declaim their lines with an intensity that approaches ecstasy, as if reading aloud from Wuthering Heights. The giggles that punctuate the girls' early friendship are not beneath Winslet and Lynskey. The screams that end the film are not beyond them.
In her diary Pauline wrote this verse: "It is indeed a miracle, one must feel,/ That two such heavenly creatures are real." In Heavenly Creatures the sad creatures whom Pauline and Juliet must have been in real life are alchemized into figures of horror and beauty. They become the stuff of thrilling popular art.