YMMV / Heavenly Creatures

• Alternate Character Interpretation: John aka Nicholas does push himself on Pauline, and her narration of their time sleeping together states that he pressured her into it. However, her delivery of the line makes her sound very attracted and she says it cheekily. Given the time period, and this is her diary, she might be writing it to make herself remain respectable; where a woman who consented right away would be seen as loose, and making it out to be John not letting her leave would be seen as respectable.
• Award Snub: To this day, many fans call foul that Melanie Lynskey didn't get an Oscar nomination for carrying her first film at only the age of seventeen.
• Awesome Moments: Honorah having caught Pauline in bed with John, who the audience knows came into her room and badgered the girl into letting him into bed, slut shames her in quite a nasty way, calling her a "cheap, little tart". Pauline then fires back "I guess I take after you then", revealing that she knows how Honorah herself got with her father at only seventeen, calling her mother on her hypocrisy.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Pauline being portrayed as a loner and not well-liked in contrast to Juliet as a popular beauty would be echoed in real life, where Melanie Lynskey later admitted to feeling ignored on the film's press tour compared to Kate Winslet, and their real-life friendship ended after the latter became a superstar (though more out of just drifting apart due to difficult schedules).
• He Also Did:
  • Dr. Hulme was a brilliant physicist who contributed important defense work to the British government during WWII and who was low-key involved in the Manhattan Project. If not for the scandal surrounding his time in New Zealand, this would be the work for which he is best known to history.
  • Likewise, Juliet became the novelist Anne Perry later in life, and was known for her prolific Victorian-themed crime novels, which are ranked along with such names as Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the annals of British mystery novels. Had her association with the murder never come to light, she still would have left a vast and respectable literary legacy.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Kate Winslet on the deck of a ship, calling out to her lover, fearing they might be separated? It might seem like a nod to Titanic (1997), but this film was three years before that!
• Hollywood Pudgy: Pauline is portrayed as rather stocky, particularly compared to tall, slim Juliet, but in a scene where both girls strip to their underwear, her figure's entirely average. It's also notable that in a later scene where her mother worries that Pauline's "lost a lot of weight," she appears to be the same size as she was before. In fact, Melanie Lynskey was cast based on her real-life resemblance to Pauline, who was seen as attractive and curvy at school. Indeed, when she has her first extended Imagine Spot in The Fourth World, wearing a flattering dress, her figure is attractively svelte.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Juliet and Pauline. Juliet, especially when she's sick with tuberculosis and her parents abandon her in hospital anyway, despite promising her they'd never leave her again after her being bedridden for most of her childhood. Of course, she aids and abets murder, but she and Pauline clearly are horrified by this. It is suggested that the very reason the girls became so obsessed with each other and desperate to maintain their friendship is because of their mutually lonely childhoods.
  • Pauline's mother. Yes, she's strict, but she is dealing with a rebellious, unstable daughter in an unhealthy codependent relationship with another unstable girl. (Pauline's friends have revealed that Honorah in real life was not nearly as sympathetic as portrayed.)
• LGBT Fanbase: Melanie Lynskey has had a significant queer fan base specifically because of this movie, along with But I'm a Cheerleader.
• Misaimed Fandom: Yes, there are fans of the movie who ship our two Villain Protagonists with each other.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The people of Borovnia, giant, unpainted plasticine figures that talk, sing, dance, and make love. Their mouths are filled in with clay too, and their eyes. It makes them look very creepy and flat.
  • Pauline suddenly morphing into Orson Welles during the love scene.
  • The murder scene at the end of the film. Closing your eyes does absolutely no good and may even make it worse. The noise the actress playing Honorah makes as Pauline first hits her with the brick. It's stomach turning how realistic and painful it sounds. Not to mention the fact that this was toned down compared to how reports suggest it was in real life (or the movie cuts it off before that point).
• Tear Jerker:
  • The lead up to the murder. Honorah thinks everything is back to normal, since Pauline went out of her way to pretend to be nicer, and Juliet is very friendly to her as well. She walks around not knowing it's the last thing she'll ever do, and even the girls seem uneasy as they have tea and cake with her. Given the opening scene, even a first time viewer is aware of what will happen.
  • The actual killing is intercut with imagine spots of Juliet sailing away from Pauline, desperately calling out "Gina!", likely realising in that moment that their attempts to prevent separation have just solidified the inevitable.
• The Woobie:
  • Prof. Hulme. It's never even hinted at what he's being fired for, but you can't help feeling sorry for him during the scene when he's crying in his study.^note A deleted scene shows Dr. Hulme being dragged up before the university board for dismissal. In Real Life, he was "asked to leave" on the excuse that his professional credentials were too good for Christchurch University and that the school was holding him back. In fact, Hulme was far too progressive for the conservative university, he was personally disliked by his peers, and the scandal of Hilda moving her lover into the family home reflected negatively on the school. Dr. Hulme was well aware that being "asked to leave" was a pretense to spare him the indignity of being fired. It's also clear he's not okay with the lover his wife dragged to their home.
  • While not shown in the film, the impact on Herbert Rieper was devastating: not only did his own daughter murder his beloved common-law wife, but his entire past (twenty years prior, he had abandoned a previous wife and family to marry Honorah) was dragged through the papers and the courts. As the family home was in Honorah's name, and her will left the house to Pauline, Herbert subsequently had another legal battle just to keep a roof over his head. The legal fees nearly bankrupted him, and he lived in near-poverty for many years afterwards. One also imagines the heartbreak of explaining to his intellectually disabled youngest daughter why her mother and sister would no longer be visiting her.

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