Metacritic reviews

This carefully-crafted tale of collective psychosis, satanic ritual abuse and pseudo-science, starring Ethan Hawke and Emma Watson, is satisfying as a compact, if over-cautious, horror-tinged psychological thriller. But it's most interesting beneath its polished, doomy surface, where complex concerns about the cultural origins of our fears are skillfully explored.

Though performed with some perspiring conviction by Emma Watson and Ethan Hawke — as a confessed victim of cult abuse and the agnostic cop investigating her case — the pic is neither disquieting enough to take seriously, nor lurid enough for fright-night indulgence.

If some of this loud horror material looks frankly absurd, that’s only, Amenabar would no doubt argue, because it reflects the hackneyed, trick-or-treats way in which we give form and body to our night fears. Fine, but for a thriller to thrill, such didactic admonishments are not enough.

Amenábar is no stranger to psychologically vivid thrillers with ghostly overtones, but Regression feels depressingly like journeyman work.

It spends a lot of time considering the fear of knowing, which may explain why Alejandro Amenábar didn’t seem to know what kind of film he was making.

Well-intended seriousness dismantles Regression, a not-exactly-horror horror movie that's also a mystery with no mystery.

The movie is ultimately a tepid and frustrating experience.

Perhaps a story like this needed to be a drama. Or maybe, with its constant, almost comical shifting of blame, a dark satire. Instead, it’s wound up as the worst of all possible alternatives: a disposable genre movie that cannot scare, convince, or enlighten.

One can make a creepy demonic horror movie, or one can make a sorrowful exposé about a real-world phenomenon that destroyed multiple families, but it’s exceedingly difficult to make both at the same time.

It’s a crunching disappointment: a dull, crass, formulaic and frankly misjudged chiller.