"Entertainment Weekly" gave the film a "C" rating and Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, "the arbitrariness of the lovers' passion and the somber hysteria with which the novelist and filmmaker treat every issue, whether it's South American dictatorship or female armpit hair, is enough to anesthetize the living".In his review for the "Chicago Reader", Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, "I can cite only one unequivocal reason for seeing "Waking the Dead", and that's Jennifer Connelly ... What makes Connelly so remarkable isn't her character's radicalism but her capacity to keep the character fresh every time she appears and to leave a lingering impression that makes the hero's (and the movie's) sense of loss acute".