Metacritic reviews

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.

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.

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

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.

Deborah Haywood’s Pin Cushion is an easy film to laud, a hard one to warm up to.

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

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.

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.