Regression

This film tells the story of a policeman who investigates a woman's claim that she is the victim of abuse from a Satanic cult, which includes her father and a fellow policeman colleague.

"Regression" has a very intriguing plot! I have to say that I did not see the twists coming, even though I had several possibilities in mind. Ethan Hawke is convincing as a dedicated policeman who wants to get to the bottom of the abuse, in order to help the poor woman who naturally evokes much sympathy from viewers. The story is intense because the mystery is well built, and the suspense is well kept. I enjoyed watching "Regression" a lot.

I don't think this one will take any prizes for acting, or even for its fairly modest special effects, but it has a reasonably intelligent script and enough tension and intrigue to keep the audience awake. It takes its inspiration from a wave of Satanic child abuse accusations and actual court cases that swept the world in the 1980s and 90s, but fizzled out with very little hard evidence emerging and very few convictions. Many blamed 'false memories' implanted by well-meaning counselors and psychologists and even the Press, unintentionally encouraging people in the creation of fantasies. 'Regression' tries to show how, in a manner reminiscent of the Salem witch trials, human suggestibility creates 'evidence' out of thin air, and delusional states become contagious. In doing this it is of course skating on thin ice, since similar ideas have often been used in attempts to discredit the claims of those reporting genuine 'historical' cases of assault or abuse.

The resolution presented in 'Regression' is perhaps one of the least satisfying aspects of the film, and I was surprised that no reference was made to the fundamentalist Christian element for which parts of America are so famous.

I think this one entertains, and after a slowish start builds up to quite a fast and dramatic pace in the second half. I would definitely recommend seeing it, but I don't think you would lose very much by waiting for it to get to rental or television.

Best thing: As Ethan Hawke is imagining the "fornication" alleged to have taken place in a barn in the middle of a Satanic meeting, we see his visualisation of a naked couple making out materialise inside the car that is parked in there. The Satanic visions are often (intentionally) hilarious. In another film we might be expected to take those same sequences seriously, but anyone who knows the slightest thing about the Satanic Panic will understand why that is not the case here.

Worst thing: Sometimes imitates the cheesy supernatural BS movies a little too accurately. When a woman is terrified by a domestic cat, I couldn't help but remember the stupidity of similarly styled movies like "The Rite" with Anthony Hopkins or "White Noise" with Michael Keaton. Despite the inevitable reversal, Regression can often feel rather more sincere in its depiction of superstitious hogwash than is really appropriate.

Alejandro Amenabar is a director who seems to hold an obsession with unusual twists on the concept of the afterlife (Open Your Eyes, The Others) and the opposition of faith and reason (The Sea Inside, Agora). It's a little unfortunate that audiences mainly seem to be disappointed by this film when they discover that there WASN'T a massive baby-murdering conspiracy organised by hooded Satanists - as if that were a massive surprise! (For once, a film claiming to be based on real life actually tells the truth.)

The real mystery here is how anyone comes to believe in hooded Satanists if there, in fact, weren't any. It is the subtext that much of what we see in the film is the product of mass hysteria which really made the film interesting to me.

As for performances, Ethan Hawke and David Thewlis are both brilliant. I've actually heard some people claim that Emma Watson is the best thing about this film, but it seemed clear to me that her accent wasn't even as convincing as in other films where she's used an American accent before.

Perhaps a rather odd comparison I'd like to make is with "The Witch". You see, "The Witch" showed events as they were described by settlers. Similarly "Regression" shows events very much from the perspective of Ethan Hawke's detective character. What we see in the film is the hysteria of unfounded fears from an insider's perspective and that is something common to both films.

So what is this film's take on the satanic panic? Well the clue's in the title. The key to everyone believing the crazy statements devoid of evidence so completely is the supposedly "scientific" methods of 'hypnotic regression'. This crosses over with some Satan-centred rhetoric on television and at the local Church to produce an explosive combination. One criticism I've heard is that a lot of those coming forth with dodgy statements were much younger than Emma Watson's character and were fed their stories much more forcefully, but I think the filmmakers are keen to show this from the perspective of a well-meaning relateable police officer who is trying to do his job well. That would be a tough sell if he were shown badgering young children in the interview room.

While I greatly admired many aspects of Amenabar's previous film "Agora" I recognise that it has a number of failings. But Regression was a very interesting and compelling cinematic experience for me and I simply do not understand the hate.

Mystery/thrillers are always the movies that I enjoy the most. I just like that genre, where you relax and try to figure out what's going on. Sometimes they are bad and sometimes they are good like this one. I didn't see the end coming and that's what I like most about it. Even though I would have preferred another ending, it doesn't matter because it came as a surprise to me and that I enjoy. Especially when it's with good actors like Ethan Hawke and Emma Watson. All the other actors were quality as well. I truly enjoyed the dark passages of Regression. Good job from Alejandro Amenábar. I will certainly watch more of his movies. I can get that some people don't like the movie but to give it a rating under five is just ridiculous. That's my point of view. Certainly when you see the amount of garbage movies that get more points then Regression.

I knew nothing about the film before I watched it, nor about the events on which it is based. Perhaps because of this I became very confused about the film's point of view.

At base, this film asks the viewer to try to distinguish reality from fantasy during a police inquiry into accusations of satanic abuse. The problem with the fim-maker's style, for me, was that all the resources of cinema were used to illustrate not only the satanic abuse reported by witnesses but also other scenarios that had not been reported, so we saw constant scenes of abusers with spookily made-up faces and monks' cowls, and various horrific depictions of satanic abuse. Because cinema is a naturalistic medium, it was difficult to know what was fantasy and what was reality.

The film in some ways had a classic detective-story structure, with Ethan Hawke as the determined investigator. But it became clear that he was an unreliable first-person character after he began behaving irrationally, and that left me, as a viewer, with nothing to cling to as a source of viewpoint in the film. When it came to scenes in which the detective was absent, it was even more difficult to distinguish what the film-maker was depicting as real and what as fantasy. For example, when the victim's grandmother went out to her shed, she saw a normal cat, which turned into a devil cat. This had nothing to do with the investigation, yet its satanic imagery was of the same type as that provoked by the regression-therapy sessions. Perhaps some point was being made about the phenomenon of group hallucination or delusion, but the film repeatedly neglected its responsibility to give us a touchstone by which we could judge the accuracy of what we were seeing.

I think the film could have addressed the topic better with the excellent actors at its disposal by NOT depicting any of the satanic events. It would have been all the more chilling for that, adding to the tension of the inquiry. The most famous dramatisation of this sort of subject matter was Arthur Miller's "The Crucible". Miller creates nightmarish scenes of communal paranoia but without illustrating any of the events described by the witnesses. And this does not hinder the story's potency. (What could be more horrific than to see Miller's village girls in full accusatory mode, triggering the arrest of various pillars of the community on charges of devil worship?) "Regression", however, lacks the necessary moral distance from the events it depicts. Only in the last minute or two is sanity restored. I left the cinema feeling as if I had been cruelly led about by the nose to no satisfactory purpose.