Sweetie

This remarkable film by Jane Campion has a distinctive photographic style perfect for this tale of a very odd family dominated by a corpulent and crazy daughter. [24 Feb 1990, p.C06]

The film leaves us staggering with a strange, almost unbearable embrace of childish innocence and treacherous spite. It is powerfully depressing. [02 Mar 1990, p.E1]

Until its final moments, Sweetie maintains a precarious and sublime balance between comedy and tragedy. The script - ably handled by a splendid ensemble cast - is generously spiced with wry and illuminating moments and is uncannily accurate in its portrait of a volatile dysfunctional family. [02 Mar 1990, p.22]

An acutely defined, starkly realized and profoundly unsettling debut if ever there was one. Read full review

The acting style edges toward parody, the material is unforgiving of Australian middle-class life in the boondocks and then, pow! - Sweetie waltzes onto the screen. Read full review

Sweetie’s brilliance stems from how Campion inventively explores the relationship between inanimate objects and personal memory, Sally Bongers’s static camera lingering on the precipice of a family unit brimming with secrets and lies. Read full review

Every frame in this comic horror story of two unstable sisters tingles with an arresting mix of deadpan humor and yawning dread. [21 Sep 1989, p.60]

One of the freshest, most exciting first features to appear in a very long time. [19 May 1989, p.1]

Cruelly honest and pitilessly funny, Sweetie is one of the nakedest explorations of familial love and desperation ever filmed. Read full review

In making her first film, Campion has done thrillingly atmospheric work, and in the process, established herself as perhaps the most perversely gifted young filmmaker to rise up in years. Read full review

Campion offsets what could have been a morose drama with an atmosphere that becomes increasingly, and unnervingly, mystical. Read full review

Sweetie looks like a small movie, and in every measurable way it is, but it possesses remarkable strength and tenacity. Read full review

Sweetie confirms Campion as a highly original movie talent. Read full review

Sweetie is a deeply uncomfortable, distressing yet wholly rewarding experience. Read full review

This Australian film by New Zealand director Jane Campion comes at you, and keeps coming at you, in peculiar, oddly enchanting bursts of detail. Read full review

Campion's merciless staging forces a more intimate relationship between viewers and characters; it's hard to take a detached stance when she's smearing raw emotions all over the screen. Read full review

Sweetie is an original, audacious tragicomedy. Read full review

Sweetie is imaginatively filmed, but it's sadly mean-spirited, too. For all its cleverness, it left a mighty sour taste in my mouth. [29 Jan 1990, p.11]

It's never consistently funny enough to work as a comedy and never forthright enough to be a successful relationship drama. And, like a lot of films made by directors whose apprenticeship was served in shorts, it is so slight it never quite feels like a feature, more like a half-hour film that has been padded out to fill a feature length. [02 Mar 1990]