Heavenly Creatures was one of Peter Jackson's earliest films, and is easily his very best.

The first half of the film is a rather oddly quick-paced and picaresque, yet captivating, haunting, and very enjoyable and frivolous film.

An apprehensive young girl (Yvonne, played by Melanie Lynskey) becomes good friends with more outlandish, edifying girl (Juliet, played by Kate Winslet), forming an eccentric and veiled sexually stirring relationship. Together, they keenly escape into an imperial fantasy world.

Juliet is an unpredictable, anomalous character, and that makes the film all the more alluring. After she becomes infected with tubercolosis in one lung, the now dependant Yvonne is put into despair and seclusion. After her recovery, Yvonne falls in love with a man, but when they are having sex for the first time, she can not stop thinking about Juliet, so she denies his love and walks out on him. After Yvonne and Juliet fully salvage their relationship once more, their parents begin to break them apart, fearing their friendship is detrimental to their health and too... friendly.

The two girls have fallen in love now, and created a world with an alternate reality, a world they play so vigorously, with endeavors so distorted and twisted, that they've begun to shift its essence onto the real world. Their psyche begins to lose prudence and moral, their obsession and desires for each-other surmount reality. The last 10 minutes of the film were some of the most taut, uneasy, and cynically malevolent pieces of cinema I've ever watched.

For how unconventionally constructed and colorful this film is, one can call it an over-the-top satire of acrimony towards homosexuals, and how unacceptable society has deemed them, how extensively they want to obstruct it. You can also call it a wild, more exaggerated rendition of Romeo and Juliet. Either way, this is an invigorating, wonderfully engaging, entertaining, tragic, and thought-provoking film which now proudly holds my #50 of all time position.

9.5/10