Hateship Loveship

Wiig's underplaying, a repressed otherworldly Sissy Spacek sort of thing, has its moments of humor, but this proud, simple woman is never for an instant comic.

It doesn't take long for us to get lost in Wiig's thorough portrayal of a dowdy housekeeper who must soldier on in the face of a cruel prank to find some kind of love in her life.

Liza Johnson's nicely tuned, and turned, adaptation of the Alice Munro short story "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage."

We've never seen a protagonist quite like Johanna, who on the one hand personifies female self-abnegation at its most domesticated, but on the other embodies the sheer will at its most stubborn.

Short fiction can be a marvelous blueprint for film and revisiting Nobel Prize-winner Munro's story in this era of "catfishing" makes a lot of sense: People are no less desperate for connection than they ever have been.

The buttoned-up, buttoned-lipped Wiig seems to have landed in the Midwest from Mars, as though, like David Bowie before her, she's The Maid Who Fell to Earth

It's a film about healing; about burnt-out yang being weeded, fertilized, and watered by yin, to grow a relationship tree. But, like, a Charlie Brown Christmas tree.

Despite its seemingly canned plot, [it] commits to delivering a glimpse into that truth spiced with the joy of optimism rather than the easy placebo of certainty.

Hateship Loveship is by no means a bad film, but it's an unfortunately easy one.

Director Liza Johnston elicits some very affecting performances from her talented actors but these are in service to [Wiig's] rather colorless character whose blossoming is a bit hard to fall for.

...a remarkably delicate portrait of a shy, recessive but ultimately unsinkable woman entirely free of self-pity that confirms the remarkable watchability of Kristen Wiig.

Punchless drama stars a serious Wiig