Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #74: Heavenly Creatures (1994).

Christchurch, New Zealand was not known to be a city of sensational events. That was until 1954, when two teenage girls committed a crime that shocked the whole country. Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker met at their local all-girls' high school in 1952 and immediately became close friends. So close, in fact, that they created their own imaginary fantastical world called Borovnia and developed what their parents considered an "unsavoury" relationship. After then facing the prospect of a forced separation, they resorted to desperate measures. By "desperate" I mean they took Parker's mother down a forest track and bashed her head in with a brick in a stocking.

Before he took us through the realms of Middle-earth to Oscar glory and recreated cinema's seminal inter-species romance, Peter Jackson (then best known for splatter movies like Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles) first gained critical praise with this recreation of what must remain New Zealand's most infamous crime story. His wife and co-screenwriter Fran Walsh had long found the case fascinating and eventually convinced him to bring it to the screen. Jackson claimed to be more interested in why the girls did what they did rather than how, or the crime itself, and so the film opens with the aftermath of the murder before jumping right back to their first meeting at school. Jackson then explores their separate and contrasting home lives (Juliet got along with her parents but their own relationship was fracturing; Pauline spent most of her time in her bedroom writing and loved her father but hated her mother), their burgeoning intimacy and their adventures in Borovnia (where Jackson's Weta Workshop team provided visual effects that were flawless for the low budget and 1994). In a lesser director's hands these strands would make a very jarring combination, but Jackson gets it just right. He and Walsh also were deservedly Oscar-nominated for their screenplay

But probably his best instincts here were in the casting. Before they respectively flew on the Titanic and obsessed over Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men, Winslet and Lynskey, in their film debuts, show what star power they had from the start, and their chemistry never falters. Winslet gives what I consider still her finest performance - by turns hilarious, cunningly duplicitous and authoritative - and Lynskey (whom the more experienced Winslet mentored on set) holds her own with just the right balance of tempestuousness and vulnerability, and narrates the story from Pauline's actual diaries in a very appropriate tone. Sarah Peirse also offers solid support as the ill-fated Honora Parker, and keep your eyes peeled for Jackson's cameo as a drunk homeless guy whom Juliet kisses.

Throw a vibrant score and lush, observant cinematography in, and you have not just the fine impetus for Jackson's Hollywood career, but one of the best movies ever made in the Antipodes.