Butterfly Kiss

Cinépix Film Properties (CFP) | Release Date: April 26, 1996

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

61	METASCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 16 Critic Reviews

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Mixed:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

Derek Elley

From its opening shots, Butterfly Kiss exudes a confidence and distinctive feel that promises something rather special. Unlike its characters, the pic knows where it's going. Read full review

Roger Ebert

The performances have a gravity about them that is unusual in the movies. How you respond to Butterfly Kiss depends on what you bring to it, and how much empathy you are willing to extend to these sad and horrifying women. Read full review

Edward Guthmann

Plummer gives her strangest, most uninhibited screen performance to date. Playing Eunice, a wildly psychotic killer with a working-class British accent and a mysterious past, Plummer draws a streak of white-hot rage across the screen. Read full review

Keith Phipps

The final effect is less haunting than was probably intended, but Butterfly Kiss is worth a look. Read full review

Kevin Thomas

The filmmakers set themselves to the daunting task of involving us in two people they couldn't remotely ask us to like or care about. But Plummer and Reeves create two profoundly damaged and dangerous people with such wit, insight and comprehension that if you're so disposed you can actually see in them your own frustrations, anger and capacity for denial and easy rationalization. Read full review

Laura Miller

As Eunice, Plummer gets a rare chance to stretch, and she doesn't disappoint. Her performance is a cocktail of despair, charm, self-hatred, bitterness, religious ecstasy, coquetry and homicidal rage. She's genuinely frightening after the fashion of early Robert De Niro, with all the hair-trigger potential violence of the truly mad. Read full review

Jay Carr

There's a layer of grim comedy in Butterfly Kiss. But what's exciting about it is its gritty way of remaining so uncompromisingly bleak in its psychopathology. [7 Jun 1996, p.58]

Stephen Holden

Where most movies portraying sociopathic behavior make some attempt at psychological explanation, Butterfly Kiss offers no background to Eunice's craziness. As she throws herself furiously through a bleak highway landscape of anonymous gas stations and convenience stores, she appears to be a self-created avenging demon radiating a powerful but loopy charisma. Read full review

Jonathan Rosenbaum

If you're sick of kinky killers and English rip-offs of American genre movies, this terminally bleak and violent 1995 road movie may irritate the hell out of you--unless you're as impressed as I was by Amanda Plummer's performance. Read full review

Marjorie Baumgarten

For the first time in her film career, Plummer really owns the movie. Plummer's habitation of the character of Eunice in Butterfly Kiss is a creation that sears itself permanently into the viewer's consciousness, though it's possible that, ultimately, you may wish the memory to be quite otherwise. Read full review

Rick Groen

Shows promise, but needs more effort, and definitely doesn't play well with others. [7 Jun 1996, p.C2]

EmpireClark Collis

A film unlikely to do much for either the serial killer genre or motorway services tourist trade. Read full review

Barry Walters

As titillating novelty turns into tired cliche, the dyke-psycho-killer genre may soon burn itself out, but in the meantime, we have the grim Brit art-film variation on the gruesome genre, Butterfly Kiss. Read full review

TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not Credited)

Plummer's fearlessness is awesome -- just try to imagine another actress willing to bare so much bony flesh wrapped in clanking chains -- but her character is nevertheless a ranting bore. Read full review

David Sterritt

Amanda Plummer is even more weirded-out than usual as a serial killer wandering through England with her sadly befuddled girlfriend. [10 May 1996, p.13]

J. Hoberman

This smoothly odious piece of work, written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and directed by Michael Winterbottom, posits the self-consciously repellent Plummer as a sort of Valerie Solanas-inflected version of the Florida serial killer Aileen Wournos. [7 May 1996]