Negative reviews mostly called the film incomprehensible, pretentious, depressing, or self-indulgent. Rex Reed, Richard Brody and Roger Friedman, all labeled it one of the worst films of 2008. Owen Gleiberman of "Entertainment Weekly" gave the film a D+ and wrote, "I gave up making heads or tails of "Synecdoche, New York", but I did get one message: The compulsion to stand outside of one's life and observe it to this degree isn't the mechanism of art — it's the structure of psychosis." American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, "...it seems more like an illustration of his script than a full-fledged movie, proving how much he needs a Spike Jonze or a Michel Gondry to realize his surrealistic conceits."