The film is characterised by Jason Buchanan of AllMovie as a German expressionist view of the story: a "nightmarish" avant-garde or experimental psychological drama.[4] It premiered at the Mozartsaal in Berlin.[2]
In a retrospective review by Tim Pulleine in the Monthly Film Bulletin that the film was "a conventional prestige opus of the day."[5] Pulleine opined that the dramatisation of the novel was "tolerably effective, barring a few lapses into excessive histrionics (Marmeladov's expiatory confession of alcoholism might have looked extreme in a temperance melodrama)."[5] Pulleine also found that the "most basic problem [...] is that the set designs create a rebarbative dichotomy within the film, since-apart perhaps from the sequences taking place on the stairway leading up to a pawnbroker's flat-the performers are not spatially integrated into the settings but remain obstinately on a separate plane of stylisation."[5]
