HEAVENLY CREATURES
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The best thing I can say about this film is that I've never seen a better movie about teenage girls growing up in 1950's Australia. These two share a common bond of poor health and develop a complex fantasy world far better than the one they live in (not hard to do in Queensland of that era), creating clay models of the characters. Their friendship becomes the best thing in their lives, and receives the fanatical level of obsession that teenage girls are capable of. The intensity of their relationship is depicted by slipping into the fantasy world they imagine; a beautiful medieval-like realm inhabited by the clay statuettes turned life-sized. I liked those bits particularly. However, the rest of the movie is about obsessive teenage girls and the parents who decide they should be separated. This decision is not taken well. Interestingly enough, the story is based on actual events, including verbatim quotes from the diary of one of the girls. The movie is directed by Peter Jackson, who went on to direct the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. This is not the most bizarre and surreal of Jackson's work, but it does include one pivotal scene of intensely brutal, disturbing violence. This film is creative, unusual, well-crafted, and informative, but I lack the love of fact-based historical dramatizations to really enjoy the finished product.
If you liked the movies below, you'll probably like this one (and visa versa):
Eight-Facet Info Rating, rated on a scale of 0 (None) to 4 (Lots!)): |