The clumsy but attractive little girl grows up to become a psychotic adult and spends eight years in a mental hospital. Subjected to more than 200 electroshock treatments, she was spared the lobotomy only because her stories were published belatedly, winning her a prize. She continues as a survivor, forever fragile. Campion's anthropological background is still as foregrounded in the direction as it was in Sweetie and keeps this film from being a remake of Cuckoo's Nest. Campion's ethnography offers us less of the 1960s romantic/political stereotype of madness as social/political oppression and more of its subtle human complexity. True, psychiatrists misdiagnose heroin (schizophrenia instead of depression), and the psychiatric hospital is not user-friendly. But he is never simply a victim. Indeed, the ever-vulnerable Janet Frame seems to continue to put herself in danger