The reviews are uniformly warm. Most critics respond to the way Campion tells Janet Frame’s story, from a poor rural New Zealand childhood through eight years in a mental institution to her release, in short, elliptical scenes that dwell on small domestic detail rather than the big events of a life. The praise clusters around the film’s restraint: gentle humour and compassion where melodrama might have been, an unsentimental eye for childhood anxiety, and the three actresses who play Frame at different ages, with Kerry Fox as the adult Frame singled out.
The spread is narrow; nobody dislikes it. The reservations are about how much of Frame herself the film lets us see. The Los Angeles Times finds her too blankly enigmatic, never quite a full heroine. Slant Magazine thinks the film conveys the woman better than the importance of her writing. The Times, otherwise approving, finds it too long.