Regression is a polished and at times absorbing film, but the execution is unfortunately problematic. Directed by the gifted Alejandro Amenábar, whose sterling previous credits include Open Your Eyes, The Others, and The Sea Inside, the film is set in rural Minnesota in 1990. As media-fueled Satanic hysteria captures the nation's imagination, a sheltered teenage girl (Emma Watson) charges her dysfunctional family with demon worship and ritualized sexual abuse. Investigating the case is a veteran detective (a very solid Ethan Hawke) who, despite his initial cynicism, slowly begins to wonder if there is in fact a supernatural threat in play. With its rain-swept air of autumnal desolation, this film is a triumph of hair-raising atmosphere, and it has an incredibly intriguing idea at its center: the way a gesture, a claim, can inspire the type of paranoia which turns families and communities against one another. Again and again, it threatens to become an engaged, focused, and hard-edged exploration of the Satanic-ritual-abuse phenomenon of the 1980s and early '90s (the false memories, the destroyed reputations), but it is distracted by an interlacing structure of overwrought dream sequences and this-cannot-be-real-or-can-it? misdirection. The genre gamesmanship may render the film more commercial (though this hardly helped upon its unheralded U.S. release), but it also results in a deflating superficiality. Another hindrance is a decidedly mediocre performance by Watson, convincing neither as a doe-eyed victim or as a potential small-town femme fatale (a polarity leaning uncomfortably toward victim blaming).

C+