Pin Cushion

Haywood brilliantly subverts her audience’s expectations at every step of the way. She introduces characters as tropes and steers them into the opposite direction.

While Pin Cushion might prove too distressing for some, it’s still peculiarly, undeniably original.

Uneven in places, Pin Cushion nonetheless offers a moving meditation on what it feels like to be different, elevated by great work from Joanna Scanlan and newcomer Lily Newmark.

Pin Cushion is as quirky and as prickly as its title, an unclassifiable dramedy about bullying and mother-daughter relationships that proposes that mean-girl behavior doesn’t go away after high school.

Pin Cushion has the visual cues of comedy, with its candy-colored kitsch and exaggerated signifiers of eccentricity and snobbery, but at heart, it’s a tragedy of naïveté.

Scanlan is stunning as the odd but fiercely loving Lyn. She regards Iona warily, knowingly, seeing into her future and what she’s walking into, but with no way to stop it.

Cinematically, Pin Cushion goes all in on a heightened, macramé-and-macaroons aesthetic that occasionally smothers the rawer nerves of its storytelling.