Créatures célestes

If someone else had made it, it would have been a mere descriptive story, fit for prime time TV, but Peter Jackson turned it into a riveting film brimming with directorial ideas that are simply incredible. Who knows, maybe the Oscar nominations helped Jackson convinced the bosses at New Line Cinema to finance Lord of the Rings. (05/08/2002)

Heavenly Creatures captivates mainly thanks to its chilling premise based on a true story and the amazing performances of Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey. In some of the fantasy sequences from the fourth world, you could feel Peter Jackson's later films, (The Lord of the Rings or The Lovely Bones) – already then, a deep sense of fictional worlds was dormant within him. Even though I knew from the beginning how the film would end, I was still on edge until the very end. (03/11/2019)

A small film that allowed Peter to develop his filmmaking skills and extraordinary flexibility of moods and different accents like no other endeavor afterwards... in a sense, it is to me the pinnacle of the New Zealand Hobbit. The wonderful transition from the pink girl's diary to the bloody edition of adolescent psychopathology is magnificent, as are the eccentric but perfectly smooth jumps between worlds. And Kate is an enchanting psychotic single poem. (06/12/2012)

Average content packaged in a brutally intellectual and visually distinctive guise that doesn’t fit everyone flawlessly. Peter Jackson is bursting with directorial ideas at every step, some are good, some not so much, but it is difficult for anyone to criticize his directorial talent in the end. However, the film does have its deaf spots, with some unconvincing scenes in terms of the performances of the actresses – their roles were extremely demanding, but somehow nobody cares. The cinematography is also memorable, which in many aspects (fast transition between whole and detail) reminds of the legendary B-movies on which Jackson built his career. Overall, however, the film is somewhat unrelatable for me as it revolves around two girls. The ending can be understood, yet it strongly contrasts with the rest of the story, which is at least peculiar. (16/01/2007)

This kind of work with the image in a drama (constant driving that reveals necessary information gradually, alienating effects, point of view changes, the impossibility of relying on who actually owns the scene) is the kind of thing that Spielberg then started doing almost twenty years later (after all, he and Jackson did The Adventures of Tintin together). An enlightened handling of a tabloid subject that doesn't actually care about the murder, but rather tries to make us understand the seemingly exaggerated and naive bond between two friends at the prime of their lives, besieged by an ossified, rational, and limited world, is a thing that is still awfully rare today. A beautiful reminder of a certain time in life that I would normally describe as non-transferable, which ends with a bludgeoning with a brick. (22/06/2020)