Most critics are favourable, and the praise gathers around the same things: an imaginative premise, a refusal to explain itself, and Bruno Lawrence. Reviewers call his performance commanding and understated, sympathetic without asking for sympathy, and several credit him with keeping a human face on what could have been a cold exercise. Geoff Murphy’s eye is singled out, as is the economy of the long stretch in which Lawrence has the screen to himself. Alison Routledge is praised for the intelligence and strength she brings when she arrives.
Reservations are scarce. Nobody dismisses the film and the spread is narrow. Where critics differ is in how they read the close: Little White Lies and The Skinny both admire its ambiguity, treating the late turn as a door left open rather than an answer, while others settle for calling it haunting. Two of the reviews, from Time Out and The New York Times, are harder to place and offer no clear verdict, but neither counts against it.