SOURCE: "Move Over David Lynch, Here Comes Australia's 'Sweetie,'" in Los Angeles Times, February 14, 1990, pp. F2-F3.

In the following review of Sweetie, Benson focuses on the relationship between Kay and her sister, Sweetie.

We haven't had a movie as profoundly unsettling as Sweetie since Blue Velvet. David Lynch's dark metaphor created the same reactions as Jane Campion's first feature; both of them have been called masterly and disgusting, by turns. But while Campion's vision is no less precise and no less bizarre than Lynch's and while both directors deal in manifestations of the unconscious, the comparisons stop there.

Writer-director Campion has her own powerful identity and a far less ominous affect. Sweetie is warm, intense and wickedly funny, with a faint edge of danger that's never quite absent, but it has none of Lynch's psycho-sexual torment. Made with a post-Modernist's eye and a brilliant satiric ear...