By Jeremy Carr.
Resurrection moves along at a generally foreboding pace with efficiently intermittent revelations and expository arrangements, largely motivated by Semans’ devious direction, Hall’s multifaceted performance, and the outlandishness of its expectant impetus.”
Margaret has it all figured out. She’s successful and in control at work, presiding over her subordinates and impressing her contemporaries; she’s tidy and organized, quick to wipe away a slight stain on her desk; and she’s physically fit, routinely exercising. Though a tad overbearing, she also has a respectable relationship with her college-bound daughter, preaching to her the necessity of projecting strength, and she enjoys the fruits of a remarkably casual affair with a married man. In other words, she’s in the prime position to have it all unravel.
And this, of course, is exactly what happens in Resurrection, written and directed by Andrew Semans. It’s incremental to start, beginning when Margaret (Rebecca Hall) first glimpses a man whose mere presence sends her into a bolting panic. But then it accelerates, twist by twist as everything she worked so hard to rigorously maintain falls apart. The man, we eventually learn, is David (Tim Roth), an ex-boyfriend she hasn’t seen for more than twenty years. As Margaret tells it, their hostile split was the result of his deranged, ultimately homicidal conduct. It’s a traumatic backstory, filled with his sadistic demands, her curious compliance, the birth of a child, and the final, extremely troubling catalyst for their separation, all of which she divulges to a dumbfounded coworker in a protracted, unbroken take. Now, so it appears, David is back with malevolent intent.
Premiering earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, Resurrection is Semans’ second feature and his first since 2012’s Nancy, Please. Though heightened by the chillingly muted cinematography of Wyatt Garfield and a tense score by Jim Williams, Semans casts some initial doubt on the picture’s prospect of originality by banking on standard thriller conventions to chart the course of Margaret’s plight, including slow, cautious walks, eerily moving shadows, and jarring nightmare imagery, revealed to be just that, a dream deceit. One early tease of unsettling things to come is when Margaret’s daughter, Abbie (Grace Kaufman), finds a tooth in her wallet, though the odd occurrence and its implications lead nowhere.
Nevertheless, more than the ominous music and Semans’ otherwise tight visual restraint—reflecting Margaret’s own superficial demeanor of regulatory order—Hall is essentially the vessel for Resurrection’s portentous drama, particularly when the chinks in her measured armor begin to appear and especially when she suffers into the territory of full-blown paranoia. Hall’s turn is reminiscent of her role in 2020’s The Night House, which, like this film, has the versatile actress running an emotional gauntlet. But along the way, we find out Margaret isn’t quite everything she seems. After Abbie is injured while drunkenly riding a bicycle (Margaret had never taught the girl how to ride a bike, believing it to be too dangerous), commonplace concerns become hyper-protective obsessions, and soon, fearing the worst of David’s aims, Margaret conducts her own lurking investigation, taking steadily drastic steps to confront her former lover. Her suspicion stretches and intensifies until it exposes her own violent capacity.
Hall is often at her best in these solitary sequences, silently communicating a good deal through her facial expressions and halting physical responses; she is by turns startled, disturbed, and determined. As such, and given a narrative assembly that is firmly in her corner (despite her preliminarily off-putting smugness), we expect a degree of affirmation when she finally sits down with an outwardly surprised David. However, their interaction is anything but reassuring, not only as it pertains to his intentions, but as far as our own interpretation of his sudden reappearance. The same upsetting of certainty and security occurs when Margaret goes to the police and presents her flimsy case. What, the officer reasonably suggests, has David actually done, aside from simply exist in the same places as Margaret? He hasn’t to this point threatened her; he hasn’t even approached her. Margaret’s mental collapse worries those around her, and we’re not so sure of her stability either, but she sees only the imminent harm of her deceptive stalker.
The primary reason why David comes across as rather harmless to start is because of Roth’s expertly unnerving yet calm and condescending portrayal. Although Hall relinquishes her assured comportment when in the company of Roth (suiting the story, not reflecting her ability), Resurrection is told by way of Margaret’s point of view, so we assume our allegiances are with her and can only believe her anxiety is well-founded. But still, at first and perhaps until the very end, her erratic, detached behavior may cause some to question the entire scenario’s validity. Meanwhile, Roth’s David hovers along the edge of innocuous normalcy and unabashed malice; until, that is, he tips decidedly to one side. The film thus takes shape as just the sort of mind game that influenced the tragic relationship between this distressingly linked couple, which plays out again with the promise of a decisive, likely perilous resolution.
What David proposes to Margaret when they reunite is wildly preposterous, impossible even, but it’s a continuation of what was purported more than a decade ago. The child they had together, which apparently died, has actually been alive all this time, living in his stomach. Or so he says. Ridiculous, she retorts, and surely it is, but the potentially encouraging notion is convincing enough that Margaret briefly reverts to her old ways and acquiesces to David’s bizarre demands, though now, admittedly, with ulterior motives. The inexplicable suggestion could be a literal or figurative claim as far as the film is concerned, inviting grotesque possibilities and/or symbolic reflections of Margaret’s maternal anxiety and guilt. But what, though it all, is the endgame: David’s, Margaret’s, and Semans’? How will Resurrection stick the landing after so much build up? Well, it does indeed have a shocking, gruesome conclusion, the success and believability of which will likely align with where one stands on the literal versus figurative premise of David’s submission. Until then, Resurrection moves along at a generally foreboding pace with efficiently intermittent revelations and expository arrangements, largely motivated by Semans’ devious direction, Hall’s multifaceted performance, and the outlandishness of its expectant impetus.
Resurrection will be released by IFC Films in theaters on July 29th and on-demand August 5th. Shudder will be the exclusive streaming home in November 2022.
Jeremy Carr is a Contributing Editor at Film International and teaches film studies at Arizona State University. He writes for the publications Cineaste, Senses of Cinema, MUBI/Notebook, Cinema Retro, Vague Visages, The Retro Set, The Moving Image, Diabolique Magazine and Fandor. He is the author of Repulsion (1965) from Auteur Publishing and a contributor to the collections ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May, from Edinburgh University Press, and David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation, from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (December 2021).
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