Common Sense Note
Parents need to know that Heavenly Creatures is based on a true story about two teenage girls in the 1950s who murder one of the girl's mothers. The murder scene is intense, graphic, and suspenseful -- way too much for tweens, most young teens, and any sensitive viewer. There is an air of budding sexuality throughout the film that is sometimes innocent, other times with hints of lesbian psychosexual drama. One of the teen characters is shown losing her virginity; the shots are of faces only, but plenty of suggestive sounds. Still, for older teens, Heavenly Creatures is an imaginative and brilliant portrayal of a gruesome true-life crime from the director of The Lord of the Rings.
Sexual
Content
A teen girl is shown losing her virginity, showing a neck-up shot of a man as he has sex with her. The two girls in the film are often shown in a tub together. While in the middle of imaginative play involving characters they have made up, the two characters strip down to their undergarments and briefly kiss on the cheeks. Questions are raised throughout the film, by parents and authority figures, as to whether or not the two girls are homosexuals.
Violence
Two girls are shown running through and out of a forest, screaming and covered in blood; later a graphic murder scene is shown. Scenes of imagined swordfights with life-size clay figures are shown hacking and slicing; sometimes these clay figures are imagined by one of the girls to be attacking someone in real life, like when a psychologist is shown being stabbed through the chest with a sword.
Language
Not applicable
Social
Behavior
The film looks at friendship, fantasy, and obsession, as well as how repression can be acted out to an extreme.
Consumerism
Not applicable
Drugs / Tobacco /
Alcohol
Set in the 1950's, some characters are shown smoking. Brief scenes of drinking at dinner, but no one is intoxicated.
