For those of us who’ve been on the outside of an abusive relationship, it’s easy for the decisions of the abused to seemingly lack logical sense. “Why don’t they just leave him/her?”, we wonder to ourselves, opining any number of ways we’d act in such a situation. Yet time and again, when the victims speak out, it becomes clear that things are never so simple. Premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, RESURRECTION, the second feature from writer/director Andrew Semans, dives headfirst into these thorny issues, depicting not only the way abuse can leave deep scars of lasting trauma but how those thoughts and feelings can start up again with either the right triggers or the re-emergence of one’s abuser. It’s no surprise that these themes are dealt with through a horror-movie lens, yet it’s remarkable how effective the film is at translating such emotions to the screen. The movie is immeasurably helped in that regard by its stellar cast, led by Rebecca Hall, whose performance here will be talked about for decades to follow.
RESURRECTION (a title that may be too obtuse and generic, so we’ll see if it sticks all the way to the movie’s wide release) tells the story of Margaret (Hall), a professional woman in her 30s who seemingly has her life together. She’s got a great job as a biologist, a loving and bright daughter, Abbie (Grace Kaufman), and even a friend with benefits, Peter (Michael Esper). Granted, Margaret isn’t squeaky clean—Peter is a married man, and she spends much of her free time faux-psychoanalyzing her young intern, Gwyn (Angela Wong Carbone), but she’s more or less in tight control of her life. That is, until she spots a man lurking around wherever she goes, someone she knows all too well. It turns out that the man, David (Tim Roth), is her ex, and things start to unravel at a rapid pace as the extent of David’s manipulations past and present—including the potentially large threat he poses—is revealed.
One of the most successful aspects of RESURRECTION is the way Semans insidiously blends together a number of genre conventions, keeping the audience off balance and putting them emotionally in Margaret’s headspace. The film begins with the staid, nearly antiseptic formalism of a Lanthimos or Cronenberg movie, and then steadily goes off the rails the more David becomes a presence in the story. At first, it’s not clear whether David is even really there, the film lightly implying that he may be a hallucination of Margaret’s (with one or two minor exceptions—such as a coworker informing Margaret that David is waiting in her office to see her—it wouldn’t be too hard to interpret the film this way). Once the film—and Margaret—accepts that David must be dealt with, it moves from this paranoid thriller space into much darker and stranger territory. The movie feels like an unholy blend of Steven Soderbergh’s UNSANE (2018) and Andrzej Zulawski’s POSSESSION (1981), where a woman victimized by a madman is revealed to share at least a little of that same madness. In Margaret’s case, her slipping further into manic paranoia and overprotectiveness toward Abbie starts to make her just as much of a threat as David is, and maybe even more so.
Far and away the crowning achievement of the movie is Rebecca Hall’s performance, a leading turn so good that it becomes the new standard for this type of horror. Hall has always been a performer whose intelligence has shown through in every character she’s played, whether that character has been an intellectual or not. Her choices are very deliberate but not showy or overwrought, which means she’s the perfect type of actor to play roles like these, where the character is required to go to such large extremes. Her work in 2020’s THE NIGHT HOUSE, another genre film that broke some new ground in terms of tone and structure, demonstrated her prowess at blending vulnerability with strength, a key mixture for horror protagonists. In RESURRECTION, Hall makes Margaret equal parts traumatized victim, determined survivor, and unstable aggressor, the actress clearly unconcerned with whether her protagonist is likable at all times or not, let alone understandable in her actions. For his part, Semans is fully aware of his actress’ value, allowing her to take center stage at several points, most notably for a long unbroken take wherein Margaret relays to Gwyn the entirety of her past with David. It’s exceedingly rare for an actor to be given this much time to themselves in a genre film, and Hall utilizes every second to its fullest.
Of course, an actor can only be this good if they have adequate support, and both Grace Kaufman and Tim Roth are fantastic in the film. Kaufman makes Abbie credibly unsettled by her mother’s behavior, to the point where it’d be easy to imagine a film centering on her character as she watches Margaret plunge off the deep end. Roth is remarkable in his restraint, playing someone who could easily devolve into mustache twirling grandiosity in lesser hands. He makes David even slimier and craftier than the script calls for, hardly ever raising his voice above a snake-like lilt and grinning like the Cheshire cat half the time. He complements Hall perfectly, becoming the yin to her yang, enacting a dance that tells us as much about the couple’s deep-seated history as it does their state of mind. Ultimately, RESURRECTION is a film about two people caught in a folie á deux, a shared insanity that Semans passes onto the audience. Unlike recent horror efforts that flirt with surrealism in such a hackneyed way that they ultimately become confusing and ineffective (like last year’s FALSE POSITIVE), RESURRECTION commits to its characters and their perspective so much that it’s difficult to have an outside, objective opinion of this couple and their abusive relationship. We are instead caught helplessly within it, so much so that any apparent victories or resolutions feel disturbingly uneasy, our own perspective just as helplessly tainted and trapped as theirs.
Tags: Andrew Semans, Andrzej ?u?awski, Angela Wong Carbone, Cronenberg, Grace Kaufman, Lanthimos, Michael Esper, possession, Rebecca Hall, Steven Soderbergh, Sundance, Sundance Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival 2022, The Night House, Tim Roth, Unsane
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