“In SWEETIE, Jane Campion's unsettlingly original, macabrely funny first film, the camera seems to capture its images from never-before-seen angles. Everything in the universe Campion has created is just slightly off-kilter, as if the Earth had positioned itself awkwardly beneath your feet. The film's subject is family life, but voices seem to call down from the flowers on the wallpaper, and every crack in the sidewalk threatens danger. It's about family life as Kafka might have viewed it. From its opening shots on, the film unfolds a mood of enveloping peculiarity. In essence, Sweetie is a horror movie; it's about the horror of having relatives who crowd in, wear your clothes, occupy your guest room and, without the slightest urging, attach their lives to yours. Deeper down, though, there's another layer, and this is where Campion is happiest. She likes it when family turbulence is repressed and springs out in freaky new shapes. Campion's style isn't articulate; it's based, in fact, on inexpressiveness, on the thoughts that get tangled up and don't quite work themselves to the surface. Her jokes, too, hit you upside the head, like Freudian snowballs zinging in from nowhere… I loved the way Campion and cinematographer Sally Bongers make the natural and the unnatural (human) landscapes appear lush and supersaturated with color, but at the same time barren, minimalist. Also, a scene in which the jackaroos dance a dusty sunset waltz in the cowboy camp has an almost serene eccentricity. The images imprint themselves instantly into your memory. 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.” — Hal Hinson, The Washington Post, 2 March 1990