Throughout the film, there is a strong sense of a deeper attraction that cannot be explained except in sexual terms, even if the girls themselves never think in that way and if those around them also do not see the meaning of this attraction. Queer deviance in that sense has to be imposed by later observers, meaning the audience for the film, because that leap in thinking was not taken by the society in which the girls lived. What the film suggests is that this leap would have been made had people known more about the situation at the time. Of course, the psychological...

The fact that her imagination today carries her to the world of mystery and death, set in a vision of Victorian England for the most part, could add to any analysis of the way she and Pauline interacted leading up to the killing of Pauline's mother.