Metacritic reviews

Portals is something of a bait-and-switch. While the concept suggests mind-bending alternate-reality stuff, the not terribly cerebral reality of the movie offers more in the line of eyeball-gouging, blood-spurting, face-melting shock horror.

Portals feels like a first pass at a bigger idea, and a framing mechanism that takes a wild series of closing turns sets up a much bigger – and darkly interesting – universe. In that way, Portals promises more in future than it delivers here.

Despite the involvement of some skilled filmmakers, Portals is a cinematic black hole – vacuous and barely perceptible in the vastness of space lit with far brighter stars.

Hopkins makes an interesting, confused and increasingly dubious victim/hero/survivor. But the whole doesn’t answer any questions, not that it asks any interesting ones in the first place.

Thanks to the efforts of the talented filmmakers and the committed performances by the all-in cast, there are some undeniably spooky moments. But you have to sit through an awful lot of tedium to get to them.

It is difficult to believe that an actual first encounter with interdimensional beings would be such a complete waste of time.