 The film holds a 44% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 16 reviews.Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade of "B+" on scale of A+ to F.

Roger Ebert wrote in the "Chicago Sun-Times", "I know it's only a movie, and so perhaps I should be willing to suspend my disbelief, but "Shining Through" is such an insult to the intelligence that I wasn't able to do that.Here is a film in which scene after scene is so implausible that the movie kept pushing me outside and making me ask how the key scenes could possibly be taken seriously."