The film received mixed reviews from critics.
Rick Groen of
The Globe and Mail praised how King's background in
documentary filmmaking had influenced the film's depiction of the "permanently half-finished look of the
mid-North", but criticized the screenplay as melodramatic, Marke Andrews of the
Vancouver Sun wrote that the film's only redeeming quality was that it liberated Follows from her wholesome
Anne of Green Gables image, while Wendy Dudley of the
Calgary Herald suggested that King's choice to cast Dewhurst and Follows together as a mother and daughter, so soon after the
Anne of Green Gables films, was one of the film's biggest problems, concluding that "it's hard to accept Marilla as a drunk and Anne as a whore." The
Los Angeles Times, conversely, acknowledged that the film "is stuck in the usual kitchen-sink realism that makes the Anglo-Canadian--as opposed to the often exciting Quebecois--cinema so often dull", but praised the cast, and Dewhurst in particular, for their performances. ==Awards==