Friends for life.

Of course, they're friends in a Peter Jackson movie, so you may suspect there's something sinister going on. "In the 1950s, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme were branded as possibly the most evil people on earth," Jackson says in the press materials for Heavenly Creatures, which is based on the real-life diaries of Parker and the independent research of Jackson and co-writer Frances Walsh. "What they had done seemed without rational explanation."

Let's say the new film is a "departure" from the director's earlier work, which included the lowbrow zombie comedy Bad Taste, the wildly scatological muppet massacre called Meet the Feebles, and the exuberant zombie masterpiece Braindead (known in the U.S. as Dead Alive). Even so, you know you're watching a Peter Jackson movie. The delicately grotesque caricatures, the skewed puritanism of 1954 New Zealand, and the stifling strictures of family life were all in evidence in Braindead, though one could hardly have imagined that Jackson could make his visions palatable for a general art house crowd. But that's what he's done here -- and it's absolutely brilliant, one of the finest films of 1994.

Heavenly Creatures is really the story of Pauline (Melanie Lynskey), a quiet schoolgirl of 14 who lacks friends but possesses a sharp and wild imagination. She quickly falls into a close partnership with a new student, the brash and fanciful Juliet (Kate Winslet). The two of them easily forge a relationship where they depend on each other for the magic that is clearly missing from their lives. Pauline watches happily as Juliet corrects her teacher's French grammar and kisses a stranger outside a movie theater. They share an affinity for "the world's greatest tenor," Mario Lanza. They share a certain horror and fascination at the sight of Orson Welles. They spin endless tales tracing the lineage of an imaginary royal family, and they sculpt clay figures to represent the nobles of their fantasies. In one scene, the two of them dance around the New Zealand countryside in their underwear, finally collapsing on the ground, exhausted from their own enthusiasms.

The relationship only becomes stronger from there, as the two discover a passage into what Juliet calls "the fourth world," a Gilliamesque fantasia of immaculate landscapes where their clay characters come to life and dance, copulate, and mete out justice to some of the authority figures populating Pauline and Juliet's world. (Pauline's diary entry explains to us that the two can perceive the fourth world only by using an obscure portion of their brains that "about 10 people" possess.) As the two bond through their fantasies, their relationship becomes more and more intense (to the exclusion of the rest of the world) and erotic (to the chagrin and embarrassment of Pauline's parents). The tension rises as their friendship is threatened, and Pauline begins to go out of her mind with grief at the thought of losing her best and only friend.

The performances, which border on the farcical, go a long way toward the success of this story. Jackson has always had a talent for coaxing actors to play to the cheap seats while still keeping their essential humanity about them, which is the key to making sure audiences care about the human beings as horrible things happen. Although certain scenes cross the line into the grotesque, they are made far more powerful by the restraint and quiet beauty in evidence elsewhere. Heavenly Creatures is antithetical in many ways to the theory which drove Jackson's earlier films -- break the taboos, explore everything in excess, be assured that too much is not enough. Jackson achieved catharsis by refusing to observe any boundaries in his seemingly out-of-control films. But Braindead, written by Jackson, Walsh, and Stephen Sinclair, certainly took pains drawing its characters, and the last half of that very gory film works as a very black metaphor for young Lionel's difficulties dealing with Mum, Uncle Les, and the rest of his frightening family. And even Meet the Feebles devoted a tremendous amount of expository time to something very much like character development (on the other hand, it also devoted a lot of time to showing muppets being blasted into clouds of blood by machine guns).

At this point in his career, Jackson has exhausted the possibilites of the gross-out. Happily, he has turned his energies to something more delicate, and more affecting. This kind of film is a highwire act -- if it's not constructed perfectly, the results are disastrous. The story needs a wholly remarkable and absolutely believable friendship at its core, the kind you can believe supersedes all other human concerns. Jackson delivers, offering up characters who feel the same glee at thumbing their noses at society that the director must have felt as he made those early, low-budget affronts to good taste. At the same time, the film's structure demands rational and beautiful segues from the real world into fantasia, a ballet of sensibilities that Jackson pulls off without a misstep. He has created a dark and transcendent love story, a graceful and complicated interweaving of innocence and obsession that begs our sympathy and compels us to understand the beautiful motives that can underly the most dreadful of human schemes.