Regression | Little White Lies

Regres­sion

08 Oct 2015 / Released: 09 Oct 2015

Two people, a woman with long hair and a man, sitting at a table and holding hands in a serious conversation.
Two people, a woman with long hair and a man, sitting at a table and holding hands in a serious conversation.
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Anticipation.

Is Emma Watson having her House at the End of the Street moment?

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Enjoyment.

Some effective chills but certain aspects of the story will raise eyebrows.

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In Retrospect.

Unlikely to induce mass hysteria.

Emma Wat­son falls foul of a satan­ic cult in this pulpy pot­boil­er from Ale­jan­dro Amenábar.

The curi­ous, often con­found­ing rela­tion­ship between the cru­ci­fix and the gun – those most endur­ing of Amer­i­can sym­bols – is super­fi­cial­ly explored in this sil­ly but enter­tain­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller from writer/​director Ale­jan­dro Amenábar (The Oth­ers).

Set in small­town Min­neso­ta cir­ca 1990, Regres­sion con­cerns a God-fear­ing community’s obses­sion with a mys­te­ri­ous child abuse case cen­tred around 17-year-old Angela Gray (an under­used Emma Wat­son) and a sect of dev­il wor­ship­pers. Her father (David Den­cik) has con­fessed to the crime, but his inabil­i­ty to accu­rate­ly recall the events in ques­tion mud­dies pro­ceed­ings. So what’s real­ly to blame here? A sick patri­arch suf­fer­ing from amne­sia? Satanism? Or is it col­lec­tive hys­te­ria? Lead­ing the inves­ti­ga­tion are detec­tive Bruce Ken­ner (Ethan Hawke) and psy­chol­o­gist Ken­neth Raines (David Thewlis), who prac­tices regres­sive hyp­no­sis and preach­es prag­ma­tism. Which is eas­i­er said than done when reli­gion and sci­ence collide.

From the out­set it’s clear that Amenábar isn’t actu­al­ly all that inter­est­ed in the hows and whys of satan­ic rit­u­al abuse, a dan­ger­ous moral pan­ic which swept across the US through­out the 80s and 90s. By def­i­n­i­tion, SRA was deeply con­tro­ver­sial, with the shock­ing nature of the alle­ga­tions, tes­ti­monies and evi­dence often cloud­ing the judge­ment of the police offi­cers and ther­a­pists direct­ly involved, as well as the wider pub­lic who inevitably became invest­ed in high-pro­file cas­es. Of course, as with any sen­sa­tion­alised cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non, the media had its part to play, and per­haps the biggest trick that Regres­sion miss­es is not pro­vid­ing social com­men­tary on the 247 news media’s prop­a­ga­tion of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and pop psy­chol­o­gy over com­mon sense and sci­en­tif­ic research.

With­out giv­ing too much away, there’s also a major issue with the tim­ing and man­ner in which vic­tim blam­ing is intro­duced to the sto­ry. What Amenábar’s twisty pro­ce­dur­al lacks in log­ic, tact and fresh ideas, how­ev­er, it makes up for in gen­uine sus­pense, though more often than not this is manip­u­lat­ed via an assort­ment of stock genre motifs – black cats, twinkly music box­es, creak­ing barn doors, cloaked appari­tions, silent callers. For a less trashy, more authen­ti­cal­ly chill­ing expe­ri­ence, seek out Ti West’s The House of the Dev­il instead.

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