Pauline Kael

“[Molly is] polite, well-bred….

“…. [W]e feel [Diana's] horror at being trapped. Yet she's ladylike and stiff when she's taken in for interrogation; her thick, curly dark hair is neat, her jaw set, her mouth firmly lipsticked. The daughter is just about the opposite. Molly, as Jodhi May plays her, is undefined in a lovely, almost plain, yet softly glowing way--like the young Peggy Ann Garner in Jany Eyre and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Molly has been raised to respect blacks, and she's sensitive enough to appreciate what she has taken in from her parents. She has an eager mind, and we get glimpses of what she learns, what she thinks. Menges, with his camera, is her co-conspirator: he peeks into things, he's open to moments of revelation. She's his fresh, young pair of eyes, looking at Yvonne's buxom blond mother, who's all kissy-kissy, and seeing that woman is good-hearted but weak, and afraid of her husband. And the camera records Molly's perception of the ugliness of apartheid. She wants to join in the fight against it, yet that fight is also her competitor. In prison or out, her mother is not all there for her. When Molly need her mom, she bashes her head against a principled person. The teme of the movie is the conflict between fighting injustice and what we owe to our families--or, more poignantly, a young girl's pain at the loss of her mother and father, though she knows the reasons for it.

“Jodhi May's performance seems just about faultless--never precocious, never forced. Molly is a kid who's required to grow up fast, and has a rough time of it, but her difficulties never go out of scale. And Barbara Hershey does well by the British-South African accent and gives a creditable, honorable performance. If something is missing from what she does, it may be partly because Menges looks at Diana as if she were a person in a documentary….”

Pauline Kael
The New Yorker, June 14 ?, 1988
Hooked, pp 475-477