Heavenly Creatures

[Pisces]

::shudder::

I just caught the tail end of Heavenly Creatures last night, after not having seen the movie for about 5 years. To this day, the end of that movie disturbs me.









SPOILER:






Has anyone else seen this? It was a movie directed by Peter Jackson (before his Lord of the Rings days) that was Kate Winslet's first movie. It was based on this true story about these two Australian girls who were friends (and well, a bit more than friends) and who both murdered the one girl's mother.

The murder at the end is very unsettling, because they basically kill her mother by going on a nice walk on a trail and one of them drops a piece of jewelry which the mother spots and bends over to pick up, and the girls have nylon stockings with a brick, and they bludgeon her mother to death.

What makes it so horrifying, though, is the fact that in the scenes before they kill her (their car trip, their walk, etc), you can see the looks of hesitation and discomfort in the girls' faces, like they're sick about what they're going to do, but they've already resolved to do it. There's even a part where they stop at a sweet shop and there's one last roll left and the daughter sort of looks at her mother sympathetically and says "You can have it."

And then, when they ARE killing her, the daughter throws the first blow and the soundtrack at that part is completely silent, no dramatic music or anything, and the noise the mother makes (one blow is not enough to kill her instantly) is just HORRIBLE. But the girls get these looks of realization about what they're doing, but they have to keep doing it.

And the film cuts back and forth between this murder scene and black-and-white footage of the girls in beautiful dresses, one of them standing on the deck of a ship and the other on the dock, and the ship is pulling away and the two girls are crying out for each other desperately.

You see, the reason they were going to kill her mother is because the two girls wanted to be together and her mother was intervening with their friendship and the other girl was going to be leaving Australia with her parents. So the ship scene is sort of like the symbolization of their love for one another being destroyed by the horrible act they commit.

The movie ends with the daughter crying out to the other girl as the ship sails away, and then an epilogue appears that explains that the two girls were convicted of murder, but were later released, one of them shipped out of Australia and the other left there.

It was a condition of their release that they never meet again.

[PrettyGirlJean]

Wow. Just your description blows my mind. Seriously, I think I'll have to look into seeing it. I really can't imagine the mother being so horrible to deserve that. Just, wow.

I am interested to see what Peter Jackson's directing skills were at the time and I imagine Kate Winslet is very young in it... although I'm not sure how old she is anyhow.

Movies rarely move me nowadays so again, this would be a refreshing movie no matter how disturbing it may be.

Thanks for the post.

[Pisces]

Yeah. It's been a long time since I've seen the movie from beginning to end, but if I remember, the mother really didn't deserve that death. What made it so disturbing is the fact that her daughter is sort of an outcast socially, and Kate Winslet's character becomes her only close friend, so it's sort of like they share their own little world together. Much of the movie reveals this sort of fantasy-like world of their imagination.

The daughter seems very much in her own, outside world, and she is not emotionally an adult yet, so it's almost like she's so absorbed in her world with her friend that she doesn't fully understand the consequences and horror of her decision to kill her mother until they are in the middle of actually doing it, and then you can just see in her face the comprehension dawning.

[Aquaignis]

WHAT THE HELL?!

I did't even read the description.