In Australia, a fractured family becomes the center of a deeply intimate drama, following two daughters whose lives tug in opposite directions and a marriage strained to the breaking point. The story orbits around Dawn, known to her family as “Sweetie,” a lively yet unstable dreamer who clings to the idea that she is a rising actor, and her sister Kay, orderly, somber, and superstitious, who works in a factory and clings to a fragile sense of predictability. Their parents, Flo and Gordon, are navigating serious marital troubles that ripple through every corner of their home.
Kay’s devotion to Louis stems from a fortune teller’s warning that she is fated to end up with him. This belief shapes her choices and heightens the tension in the relationship, as Kay’s fear and foreboding drive her to extreme acts—such as uprooting and concealing a tree that Louis has planted in the yard, a symbolic gesture born from her unease about the future.
When Dawn returns home after an absence, she brings with her a drug-addled lover and a self-styled “producer” named Bob, and she uses fear and intimidation to assert control over the family. Her presence unsettles everyone, and Gordon responds by choosing to overlook her escalating mental distress, insisting that love for his daughter means accepting her as if she were still a child. Flashbacks reveal Sweetie’s earlier performances—dances, songs, and small circus-like tricks—where Gordon’s help and Flo’s indulgence were a constant, offering a window into a past that foreshadows the current chaos.
The film tracks Sweetie’s emotional volatility and the physical havoc she wreaks—think ruined clothes, broken furniture, and a household caught in a cycle of blame and forgiveness. Louis ends things with Kay under mounting strain, while the family endures a series of circular confrontations: Sweetie erupts, the family forgives, a fragile peace returns, and then the cycle starts again with new intensity.
Ultimately, Sweetie’s grip on reality unravels. She strips off her clothes, paints her body black, and secludes herself in her childhood tree house, refusing to come down as the fort trembles and finally collapses. The collapse seals her fate—killing her and injuring Flo—while the tree itself becomes a haunting emblem that interrupts her private interment when a root intrudes on the grave.
In the aftermath, Louis and Kay mend their relationship, and the family—though scarred—achieves a difficult sense of resolution. They no longer allow Sweetie’s manipulation to destabilize them, while a fragment of her truest, most innocent self lingers in Kay and in the parents’ memories, preserving the image of Sweetie as a perpetual child even as they move forward.
