BY FRED BLOSSER
Angela Gray (Emma Watson), a young woman living with her father
and grandmother in rural Minnesota, accuses her father of sexually molesting
her. The father, John (David Dencik), is
brought in by the police for questioning. A reformed alcoholic and widower, John claims to have no memory of
abusing his daughter, but he is reluctant to deny the accusation because, he
says confusedly, “It must be true. Angela would never lie.†The
department brings in psychologist Dr. Kenneth Raines (David Thewlis) to consult
on the case, and Raines suggests that he hypnotize John to see if he can unlock
the repressed memory. Under hypnotic
regression, John “remembers†being in Angela’s bedroom, witnessing a sexual
assault on his daughter, and photographing it, but he says the rapist was
actually one of the department’s own officers and a family acquaintance, George
Nesbitt (Aaron Ashmore). The senior
investigator assigned to the case, Det. Bruce Kenner (Ethan Hawke), is quick to
believe the accusations. Convincing his
commanding officer to detain both Gray and Nesbitt, he goes full tilt to find
evidence.
Supported by Reverend Beaumont (Lothaire Bluteau), the pastor of
the fundamentalist church that she and her family attended, Angela begins to
level increasingly bizarre charges. She
alleges that her grandmother Rose (Dale Dickey) was also involved in the abuse
as a member of a robed, hooded satanic cult that holds secret orgies and
sacrifices infants. “They’re
everywhere,†she tells Kenner, and suggests that the car crash that killed her
mother four years before was no accident. As evidence of her story, she fearfully shows the detective an inverted
cross branded on her stomach. “Now
they’ll kill you too,†she warns. For
Kenner, her charges are given additional weight by a barrage of TV media
reports about a covert nationwide network of Satan worshippers.
Filmed in Canada but supposedly situated in a grim, gray
American Midwest locale that looks like a backdrop from one of H.P. Lovecraft’s
gothic horror stories, writer-director Alejandro Amenábar’s “Regression†(2015)
is presented as a mystery story with horror overtones: Is Angela telling the
truth? Where are the photographs that
would substantiate her story and John’s hypnotically “retrieved†memory? If devil-worshippers lurk among the everyday
townspeople of Hoyer, Minn., who are they?
Viewers under 30 may be just as confounded as Hawke’s driven,
ultra-caffeinated investigator. Others
who are old enough to have watched tabloid TV in the mid-1980s will catch on
faster, especially since Amenábar tips his hand at the outset by informing us
that the story takes place in 1990. During the 1980s, in a series of sleazy TV shows presented as fact,
Geraldo Rivera, Sally Jessy Raphael, and others fostered the scary notion that
devil worshippers formed an incestuous, murderous underground movement in many
American towns and cities. The specious
stories were founded on lurid “memoirs†of people who claimed to be the victims
of satanists, cases of alleged “ritual†child abuse prosecuted by overzealous
authorities on the basis of shoddy investigative techniques (notably, hypnotic
regression), the rantings of deluded or unscrupulous TV preachers, and leftover
memories of the 1969 Manson murders. If
they weren’t true believers already, many middle-class viewers were convinced
when they tuned in to “The Devil Worshippers,†a segment of ABC’s prime-time
“20/20†show in May 1985, and heard host Hugh Downs proclaim: “There’s no
question that something is going on out there.†If the normally unflappable Hugh Downs was worried, they should be
too. Besides, tens of thousands of
parents were already fretting that their kids were being seduced to the Dark
Side by satanic symbolism in Black Sabbath rock videos.
The panic eventually subsided in the early 1990s as the
salacious stories were discredited and clearer thinking finally prevailed. In the meantime, the tabloid hacks had lost
interest and moved on to other worthy endeavors, like cracking Al Capone’s
money vault. But the damage had already
been done to the careers and reputations of many innocent people who had been
slandered as rapists and degenerates.
Although Amenábar’s movie is handsomely (if gloomily) mounted
and well-acted, there isn’t much of a mystery to Angela’s story if you remember
those relatively recent historical events. Consequently, by the time Kenner figures out that he’s being gamed by a
mentally disturbed young woman, TV hype, and his own overheated imagination,
you’ve already there waiting for him to catch up. I thought that Amenábar would put a twist in
the story that Angela’s coven of backwoods satanists actually existed, and Det.
Kenner would wind up like the unfortunate characters in John Moxey’s “City of
the Dead†(1960), José Ramón Larraz’s “Black Candles†(1982), and of course
“Rosemary’s Baby†(1968). But no, Kenner
confronts Angela and the film ends with a written epilogue about the real-life
‘80s satanist scare. No ambiguous final
shot of bystanders secretly wearing inverted crosses and giving Kenner sinister
glances after he walks away. Still,
Amenábar reminds us that it doesn’t take much to prey on people’s fears and
phobias. We may not worry today whether
Joe and Ethel next door have a satanic altar in their basement, but that’s only
because 24/7 cable shows, network news, and internet gossip have given us more
immediate things to fear and revile. Never mind that most are as spurious as Hugh Downs’ devil worshippers.
The
2016 Anchor Bay DVD of “Regression†is
crisp and sharp. Hawke, Watson, and
Amenábar discuss the film in four short features added as supplements.
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