The film starts with Siegfried Sassoon's open letter of July 1917, Finished with the War: A Soldier's Declaration, inveighing "against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed".

With the string-pulling and guidance of Robert Graves, a fellow poet and friend, the army sends Sassoon to Craiglockhart War Hospital, a psychiatric facility, rather than court-martialling him.

The film does not concentrate on any single main character and their story-line, but a follows the interweaving of several: Dr Rivers and his patients Siegfried Sassoon and Billy Prior.

Prior suddenly regains his speech, then looks for female companionship and begins a relationship with Sarah, a munitions worker at a local factory.

Meanwhile, Rivers has developed his own mental health problems by proxy from dealing his patients' trauma and so takes a leave of absence to visit Lewis Yealland's medical practice in London.

Rivers is repulsed by the treatments' brutality and returns to Craiglockhart to continue in producing what Sassoon calls his "gentle miracles", but at the cost of his own mental health; in contrast to Yealland, who lacks empathy, but is proud of his success in treating mutism.

The concluding scenes show Wilfred Owen's body in a French waterway in the final days of the War and Rivers's sadness on hearing of it.

The reviewer added that Wilby was "very good, bristling with upper class righteous indignation", Pryce was "on top form" and Miller "impressive".

[3] Hadley Freeman writing for Cherwell calls it a "genuinely powerful film, affecting and effective" and praises Miller's performance.

Because the film was a British-Canadian co-production, Regeneration received various nominations at the Canadian Genie Awards, including Best Achievement in Direction (Gillies MacKinnon), Best Motion Picture (Allan Scott, Peter Simpson), Best Music Score (Mychael Danna), Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Jonathan Pryce) and Best Screenplay (Allan Scott).