We study the local repulsion between critical points of a stationary isotropic smooth planar Gaussian field. We show that the critical points can experience a soft repulsion which is maximal in the case of the random planar wave model, or a soft attraction of arbitrary high order. If the type of critical points is specified (extremum, saddle point), the points experience a hard local repulsion, that we quantify with the precise magnitude of the second factorial moment of the number of points in a small ball.