Back in 1995, Peter Jackson was just another director with a beard. His previous blips on the movie radar had included cheap splatterfests Bad Taste and Braindead, but it was with Heavenly Creatures that the Kiwi helmer made his first serious impact.

Based on a brutal murder committed in 1950s New Zealand, Jackson's enthralling film takes us on a detailed and often fantastical journey as he interprets the real-life events which led 15-year-old Pauline Rieper (Melanie Lynskey) and 17-year-old Juliet Hulme (Winslet) to smash the skull of Rieper's mother with a rock.

Taking its lead from Rieper's actual diary entries (its discovery by police led to her conviction), the film charts the genesis of the friendship between the two emotionally unstable girls, which becomes so disturbingly intense and "unwholesome" that both sets of parents eventually determine to keep them apart. It's this unbearable fear of being separated (they plan to go to Hollywood to become film stars) which prompts Lynskey to hatch a plot to kill her mother, whom she quickly comes to loath once she threatens to cut her off from Winslet.

Cleverly playing down the sensationalist nature of the story, Jackson concentrates on carefully evoking the ambiguous mutual affection which grows between the two inseparable friends. This bond manifests itself in spectacular fashion when the girls invent their own fantasy land (the fourth world). By mentally escaping there, they can forget the mundanity of their daily lives.
This made-up land allows the director (who makes a fleeting cameo appearance) to unfurl an imagination as wild as Rieper and Hulme's as we occasionally enter their magical kingdom, which is inhabited by life-size versions of the clay models the pair have been busy sculpting in the real world.
Jackson's gore-drenched background comes in handy here, because as luck would have it, both girls have a fascination for the macabre, prompting the director to quite literally cut loose with some graphic imaginary executions, so paving the way for the sickening denouement.

But it's his studied examination of their relationship which grabs the attention. It's a friendship which grows from unlikely beginnings. Rieper is dumpy and lives with her less-than-well-off parents in a very plain house, while the dazzling Hulme lords it in a mansion with her wealthy mum and dad. So they seem to have little in common.

But soon they're sharing their love of Mario Lanza, comparing ailments and running away from the dreaded Orson Welles in a priceless chase sequence.
The whole movie (which uses many of the locations where the actual events occurred) stands or falls on the performances of the two leads and both Lynskey and Winslet portray their characters with riveting conviction. Backed up by a more than capable supporting cast, it's a film which proves fascinating on many levels.

Not only does it leave the viewer to ponder the suffocating morality of the time, but it also seems to suggest that the crime might have been the result of a tragic series of coincidences.

Released from custody after five years, both Rieper and Hulme are still alive today. Hulme has been identified as best-selling British crime novelist Anne Perry. Rieper's whereabouts remain unknown.

David Lichtneker