By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Wow... I'm truly stunned at how abysmal this movie really is. Jane Campion tortures both her characters and the audience in this excruciatingly bad black comedy/drama about a - to say the least - dysfunctional family. Comes off as a pretentious film school final project that reeks like a rancid cross-contamination between David Lynch and John Waters. Seemingly random, unengaging and disjointed things just occur (either deadeningly slow or at the tone of loud shouting) in a sordid little universe populated by either repellent loonies or lame wimps that I only wish to disappear from the screen as quickly as possible. No nuances, no character development, no humor to be found anywhere. In bits, I detect fine cinematography, but even there, it's mostly shot in a way that casts long shadows over the scenes. You'd have to be psychic to spot that this director was to make the masterpiece "The Piano" some years to follow. One of the easiest bottom scores of 1/10 I've ever handed out.

I am currently avoiding writing for my writing job and writing this review instead. But before that I went out to get coffee. I considered going to a tiny spot tucked on a small street whose proprietor routinely stands outside on a nearby thoroughfare highfiving pedestrians in the morning; this sort of prosocial behavior normally repulses me but the owner's desperation to ensure the survival of his assuredly moribund business has me charmed. Unfortunately for him, it's quite warm today so instead I went to the much nearer french bakery with its trompe l'oeil wallpaper meant to resemble bookshelves. While waiting for the elevator back up to my refrigerated office, a woman yelled into her phone "I can't hear you, you are stuttering" to some poor soul, and a man in a fedora complained about "crippled tourists," in line before him at Starbucks. I watched Sweetie on the recommendation of a friend infuriated by Breaking the Waves; she had in turn received this recommendation from a high school friend of mine who I introduced to weed, and who then lived in Korea for too many years. Sweetie could have been weirder. At first, it seemed ready to be very weird. Main character Kay gets her tea leaves read alongside her psychic's aphasic son. A wide shot of a work lunch room is suddenly interrupted by the shrieking of an employee as she dives toward her friend's newly appearing engagement ring. Kay flips out over the particularly dreary leaves of a tree her boyfriend has decided to plant smack dab in the center of their driveway. Sadly, most of the film's oddities are eventually subdued by a fairly neat and orderly story, which even provides a nice family backdrop to explain away the quirks of sisters Kay and Sweetie. Loose ends are tied up. I would still recommend watching this for its striking visual palette and the fact that the aforementioned psychic's spastic son is never explained.

Australian filmmaker Jane Campion's unorthodox daydream of family ties will likely infuriate more people than it pleases, defeating expectations as easily as it defies casual analysis. Describing it in any detail would only spoil the joy of discovery, for both the story and the idiosyncratic style of the film itself, which turns an already cockeyed domestic melodrama (introducing the oddball in-laws of an estranged young couple) into a sometimes grotesque but strangely compassionate portrait of sad, eccentric people living on the fringes of Down Under society.Campion challenges the viewer's perception of what is or isn't real, using a portentous, artfully composed visual scheme, emphasizing in every shot her eye for geometry and deadpan comic detail. And then, mid-way through the story, along comes Sweetie herself to upset all the symmetry. Her younger sister calls her "a dark force"; her father treats her (affectionately) as the child she'll always be to him; and her mother, out of exasperation, simply walks away from all the subsequent turmoil. In a nutshell, Sweetie is the loose cannon in every family closet, and as played by newcomer Geneviève Lemon she's one of the more obscene and compelling characters ever to crash a movie scenario. Her story is, by turns, tender, pathetic, amusing, ominous, totally unique, and just plain weird.

This film is one of the best films ever written and shot about the effects of mental illness on the psycho-dynamics of a family. Shot with a strongly claustrophobic sense of misé-en-scene, the extended family of Louis, Mom, Dad, Kay and Sweetie always crowd and clutter the frame, unable to extricate themselves physically and emotionally from one another. Geneviève Lemon's performance of a mentally ill young women (Sweetie/Dawn) sends chills up the spine of anyone who has worked with those who suffer like this. Although it does contain some nudity and slight sexual content, the dramatic push of the film as a whole makes this an extremely moving film even for teenagers, especially for families who are coping with mental illness. Campion's writing and above all her directing soars in this profound and compelling film.