Reception
The Chumscrubber received mostly negative reviews from critics. Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 34% of 58 collected reviews for the film were positive, with an average score of 4.9/10 and the consensus that "This derivative poke at suburbia falls short of delivering a scathing indictment of upper middle-class disconnect." At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 41 based on 12 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film 1 star out of 5, describing it film as "an appallingly clumsy and stupid take on drugs, kidnapping and suicide in suburbia". A. O. Scott expressed similar sentiments in The New York Times, calling the film "dreadful" and criticizing its unoriginality. Variety's Scott Foundas also wrote that the film "doesn't have an original bone in its body or a compelling thought in its head" and called it "insufferable", "self-conscious" and "smug". Olly Richards of Empire gave the film 2 stars out of 5 and described it as "a tragic waste of acting talent, with nothing new to say." The A.V. Club's Keith Phipps praised Posin's technical direction and the cast's acting skills, but found that the film still fell "flat on its face".
The film was more warmly received by David Sterritt of The Christian Science Monitor, who described it as "dreamily surreal, acutely intelligent, and strikingly tough-minded" and called it a "stunning directorial debut".
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