SOURCE: A review of Sweetie, in The Nation, New York, Vol. 250, No. 7, February 19, 1990, p. 252.

In the following review, Klawans praises the narrative structure and visual style of Sweetie.

One of the first things you see in Sweetie is the muddy-hued, domestic equivalent of a Rorschach blot: the pattern in a carpet. The camera peers down on this floral invitation to daydreaming, which takes up most of the screen; to one side, a fragment of the narrator's body is visible. Kay (Karen Colston) begins to talk in voiceover about her fantasies, but you already know plenty about them from the image. Sweetie—the utterly distinctive and assured first feature by Jane Campion—will be about the meanings people read into whatever they choose to see as clues: tea leaves, a tossed coin, a stray curl of hair, a little girl's aptitude for clowning. And just as the opening shot...