The perspicacious A.A. Dowd included CANARY in his Year in Review: 2009.

"If Avatar does change moviemaking forever, as so many have claimed it will, we cinephiles are gonna need to chart a different course through unwritten history. The video revolution was not televised because it never arrived, but we are not without our promising prodigies and potential figureheads. Case in point: while James Cameron was still tinkering with his perfect future, a certain little corner of the blogosphere was grappling with a jaggedly imperfect one. Canary, a high-concept, low-budget, little-seen transmission of dystopian dread, wasn’t just the best American indie of the year. It was also the most naggingly discussable. Was Alejandro Adams, scrappy visionary at the helm, a polemicist or just a talented fuck-around? Should one make sense of the elliptical narrative—-a screaming nightmare in white collar digs, the mundane mixing it up with the malevolent—-or simply fall under the insidious influence of the film’s (distinctively, hypnotically) digital textures? Was the whole thing a metaphor for the filmmaking process? Or was it just a scary, scary-good art thriller? And what the holy hell was that ghostly woman really doing with that blue gel? Canary makes you want to lean in close, to study its corners and crannies, its mysteries and nuances. We need Adams and his ilk, we need them badly. Because, like it or not, there are more Avatars where that first one came from."