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She's let loose too much by Chabrol, which does great disservice particularly to the build-up to the final scene...

Reviewer destinationssecretes sums it up well: vulgar and rogue. And pedestrian... Deneuve is excellent though. Lemercier can be pretty funny if directed well, that is obviously here, not by her own self...

This film was released when I was a teen, and I was afraid of it. I had read the novel, around the time the movie came out, and found it very scary. Plus a couple of school pals of mine had managed to sneak their way into the theater, saw it, and were blown away by it. So it is that I've always shunned it, even though I love good horror movies. But this one sounded like it was just too much... I watched it for the first time in my life in full last week. The sounds coming out of Reagan are the single frightful element for me. Nothing else at all scared me the slightest and lingered on thereafter in my mind - and I'm impressionable with this kind of stuff! Most recent naysayers here (the lower votes) summarize the problems with the screenplay and characterization much better than I would. Reagan is improbable and goes from something too sweet in her normal condition to the very extreme, which looks too much like the more violent tantrums of a spoiled and pampered child... The makeup job is overdone and poorly used - usually with too much light in the room. Lots and lots of noise... (And what really is less scary than loud noise?) "It's the rats"... Really, almost laughably silly! Softer noises in the attic growing in intensity but with subtelty would have been so much more efficient... Finally, I never got the "Tubular Bells" tune as used for this film. They should have stuck with the other modern classical composers (Webern, Penderecki...) employed elsewhere.