The awkward but attractive child grows up to be a psychotic adult and spends eight years in a mental hospital. Subjected to more than 200 electroshock treatments, she escaped lobotomy only because her stories were published late, which earned her an award. She continues like a survivor, still fragile. Campion's anthropological background is always at the forefront of the director as it was in Sweetie and it prevents this film from being a remake of Cuckoo's Nest. Campion's ethnography gives us less of the 1960s romantic/political stereotype of madness as social/political oppression and more of its subtle human complexity. It is true that psychiatrists misdiagnose heroin (schizophrenia instead of depression) and that the psychiatric hospital is not friendly. But she is never simply a victim. Indeed, Janet Frame, still vulnerable, seems to continue to put herself in danger.