It’s Rebecca Hall that made me want to watch this. I saw her name in the release and decided I didn’t care what the story was, if she was in the lead, I was on board. It was a good bet. Hall has always been a captivating presence, her face full of vulnerability while still projecting immense power. This is her film, all the way, director Andrew Semans taking full advantage of what Hall can do with everything from a smile in bed as she talks to her lover to frets of extreme personal danger. This should have been a forgettable chiller, but Hall gets into the DNA of it and changes everything about it.
Margaret (Hall) is a single mom, working as an exec in the bio-tech industry. She’s authoritative and in control, offering advice to a younger colleague while trying to keep her teen daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman) on the right path. She’s not in a relationship but is sleeping with Peter (Michael Esper), a married man she works with. All seems relatively stable until one day at a seminar, she spots a familiar face in the audience with her. He’s David (Tim Roth), a man she dated more than twenty years earlier, who did something we understand wholly wrecked her. She runs in panic the moment she sees him, then sets about trying to understand why he’s back. When she finally confronts him, she restarts their destructive bond and soon spirals out of control.
Written by Semans, Resurrection is more a character study than a straight-up thriller, allowing Hall to explore Margaret’s breakdown with a slow painful commitment that is the film’s greatest achievement. No matter the conventions of the story’s more baser elements, it is Hall that sells the erosion, even as Semans tends to fancy a more dialogue driven potboiler than one more seeped in physical aggression. It’s our job to pick up the clues in the first half as we watch Margaret seem to slip into madness whenever she sees David, and we get the sense even from these brief far away encounters that he has damaging control over her psyche. Indeed, the woman we meet as a pillar of power at the start is almost immediately derailed, left to sit and try to find her breath. What is going on?
This is not a cheap thriller, even as it dresses up as one, though does manage to bind it together with the violence we expect. However, to that end, Seaman’s steers clear of the typical. Whether that works or not depends on the viewer. If you’re looking for something a little more talky and morose than hyper kinetic and stabby, this might be your thing. I found myself unable to look away, Semans framing Hall in gorgeous swatches of dark and light, capturing a traumatic performance that is a bit harrowing, even as the story itself spins in circles.
Roth is deviously malicious, and I really like Kaufman’s take on the angst-riddled teen. Jim Williams‘ score is caustic and unnerving. Angela Wong Carbone does good work as a distressed intern. There’s a lot that makes the list for why this is worth a watch, but there’s need for fair warning. Resurrection doesn’t play by the rules and is at times incredibly weird. It’s finale will be all questions. But no matter the risks Semans takes, I’ll circle back to why it works: Hall. Dark and moody, sometimes impenetrably unreachable, she carries this from frame one. Don’t miss it.