Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar first came to attention with twisty psycho thrillers like 1997's Open your Eyes (Remade by Cameron Crowe as Vanilla Sky) and the satisfying old-school horror chills of 2001's The Others before winning the Best Foreign Language film Oscar for the heart-wrenching melodrama The Sea Inside in 2005.
You'd think then that his return to feature films after a decade would be something to look forward to. But Regression is a hugely unsatisfying, flat psycho horror apparently inspired by a true story about Satanism in a small US town.
Bruce Kenner (Ethan Hawke), a detective in the fictional town of Hoyer, Minnesota, is investigating a child-abuse case involving Angela (Emma Watson) and her father John Gray (David Dencik). Things take a turn, though, when claims of satanic ritual are made and regression therapy specialist Dr Raines (David Thewlis) is called in to assist.
The age-old fear of the dark arts drives Kenner increasingly paranoid until, in a trite piece of all too neat psychological discovery, things are revealed not to be what they seem. All of which could have been handled in a deftly creepy, unnerving Rosemary's Baby fashion but is rather ploddingly laid out in shadowy camera work and delivered with babbled earnestness by a cast who don't seem to believe in the ideas they're putting forward.
It's not that you see the twist coming but rather that it's hard to remain interested by the time it arrives. Amenábar's heavy-handed points about the pitfalls of regression therapy are not original or insightful and not strong enough to hang the flimsy material of the film on.
