Not all reviews were positive. The "Orlando Sentinel"s Roger Moore called "The Edukators" "a surprisingly generic German 'Stockholm syndrome' romantic triangle thriller," adding: "It ends interestingly, but it would've ended better, and played better, had it been half an hour shorter." In "Slant Magazine", Jason Clark wrote that the film needed "a touch of the perverse", but "Weingartner plays out the drama far too earnestly, and the story barely sustains the length of a movie half of its running time." According to Jack Mathews of the "New York Daily News", "The dialogue between the captive and the captors gets a little didactic, and the ending is as contrived as it is cynical." Similar criticism of the film's didacticism was made by Brett Michel of "Boston Phoenix", Kriss Allison of "Stylus Magazine" and Glenn Whipp of the "Los Angeles Daily News".