It’s likely too dark to please the girls who might otherwise relate to its story and star, and probably too simple and pitch-positive for genre fans.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Has an elegance roughly on par with a Goosebumps novel, refusing to follow its own contradictory rules and barely sustaining a pretense of internal logic.
Vincenzo Natali emphasizes technically impressive shots in the service of predictable, boring expository beats, at the expense of elaborating on his main character's growing feelings of isolation and torment.
It's utterly unconvincing and not scary in the slightest.
The Hollywood Reporter by John DeFore
Less twisted than Natali's last film, Splice, it's sufficiently novel to uphold his reputation as a filmmaker not content telling conventional fanboy stories.
After performing many narrative backflips in an attempt to lucidly resolve things, Haunter eventually settles for half-baked uplift that renders much of what came before ridiculous and nonsensical.
The New York Times by Nicolas Rapold
Lifted by the sepulchral Stephen McHattie as Lisa’s nemesis, the film’s frazzled thought experiment becomes an adequate yarn.
Teen Lisa Johnson (Abigail Breslin) is trapped in a kind of undead, unfunny “Groundhog Day,” living one particular 24 hours with her family over and over.
RogerEbert.com by Simon Abrams
Once Haunter's story snaps into focus, and its creators pull you towards its inevitable conclusion, the film's flaws become that much more apparent.
The premise is provoking and well-conceived, confidently moving things forward until the increasingly knotty rules of the film’s universe eventually come to overbear the experience a bit in the homestretch.