Creed of the Australian publication The Age noted the film as a "delicate and remarkable debut," and likened elements of it to the Carson McCullers novel The Ballad of the Sad Café. Critic James Berardinelli wrote that "Mangold captures the nuances of life perfectly, and, by never cheapening his vision through facile resolutions, he fashions a memorable cinematic portrait." Berardinelli subsequently included the film in his book Reel Views: The Ultimate Guide to the Best 1,000 Modern Movies in 2005. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times called the film "a small, quiet miracle of a movie in which tenderness, compassion and insight combine to create a tension that yields a quality of perception that's almost painful to experience", comparing its cinematography to the work of R.W. Fassbinder, and remarking the effectiveness of Thurston Moore's score for the film. Edward Guthmann of the San Francisco Gate called the film "an act of faith in itself — an argument for the kind of subtle, humanistic traces that used to be familiar on screen but somehow became all too scarce," while Barbara Shulgasser of the San Francisco Chronicle noted: "There is nothing cutesy or gimmicky about Heavy, which may be why something in its grimness recalls the work of Ingmar Bergman." Other critics were less laudatory of the film, including Jeff Millar of the Houston Chronicle, who wrote: "Even at 80 minutes, Heavy would have been weighted with redundancies. So you can imagine what happened on the way to making it 105 minutes long." Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune felt its portrayal of its characters was exploitative, noting: "Instead of the poetry of common people, Heavy romanticizes the mundane or grotesque. Mangold seems to be trying to revive some of the emotional quality of the late '40s-early '50s work of Southern Gothic writers like Carson McCullers, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams. But presenting Victor as an exemplary sufferer–a wounded soul trapped in the body of a lovelorn pizza cook, with Farrah Fawcett posters in his bedroom–makes him a little ridiculous, without quite making him funny. In Heavy, the sensitivity is so thick, the characters can hardly breathe." The internet film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, as of 2022, has the film ranked at 87% fresh (or positive), with 26/30 reviews being in favor of the film. The site's consensus states: "With Pruitt Taylor Vince's naturalistic performance and sympathetic direction from James Mangold,