Writer-director Andrew Semans’ deeply strange and truly traumatizing “Resurrection”It shares a lot with a typical thriller about stalkers. Rebecca Hall is not unfamiliar with the sub-genre. “The Gift”And, in a circular way “The Night House”Played by Tim Roth, she portrays a successful executive at an pharmaceutical company. She’s a single mom to her teenaged daughter. Her reality is disrupted when her ex-husband becomes abusive and re-enters her world.
There’s nothing that isn’t scary about that scenario, narratively familiar as it might be, and for a good, long portion of “Resurrection,” that’s all we need to know. Hall is a skilled performer and one of the most effective at communicating complex psychological trauma. It is upsetting to see her nervousness when Roth is just 50m away at a conference or at a departmental store. We don’t need to know details of her pain. We are able to trust her pain.
But when the time comes for Semans’ thriller to lay all its cards out on the table, and to reveal exactly what happened in our protagonist’s past that has reduced her to a walking panic attack, something altogether new happens. Hall tells us about decades of trauma in one shot. At first it is disturbingly plausible and then it turns out to be uncomfortably bizarre. Until finally, hidden in the middle of a creepy future audition piece, comes a revelation so ugly and absurd that, were a critic to reveal it right now, you’d assume “Resurrection”He was making fun of us.
The central concept of “Resurrection”This is so strange that performers such as Hall or Roth start losing their bearings as quickly as the characters. Semans could have been writing himself into a corner. Hall’s character, Margaret, needs a backstory so horrifying that the audience understands and forgives her for not sharing her history with her teenage daughter, Abbie (Grace Kaufman, “Man with a Plan”Abbie begs Margaret to explain her frightening, unpredictable behavior.
Perhaps Semans has a slight overshot and concocted a scenario so bizarre and disturbing that it reaches our subconscious. Perhaps the point of this story is to show how effective psychological manipulation can be by infusing abusive relationships with delusions that cannot be literal. If a person as fiercely reasonable and rational as Margaret can, over the course of multiple sleepless nights, fraught and threatening conversations, and regression into unhealthy power manipulations, lose sight of reality, well — surely anyone can.
“Resurrection”The pressure is on, and the game cast provides much of the pressure. As Margaret, Hall is a tower of strength built on a foundation of vulnerability, while Roth gives us a terror of a human being who’s also possibly frail enough to believe his own twisted lies. Kaufman’s Abbie, who knows nothing of her mother’s plight, becomes a victim of a different kind of emotional trauma and fights back as best she possibly can. It’s a five-alarm fire of an ensemble, scorching their way through every scene.
Wyatt Garfield’s stark cinematography keeps us grounded in some sort of reality.“Nine Days”) and the orchestral editing of Ron Dulin (“Model”), who seamlessly modulate between clearly defined reality and surreality so gracefully that it’s exceptionally difficult to tell where one segues into the next, or if indeed they ever have. To make the plot work, it takes skillful execution. “Resurrection”It seems horrifyingly plausible, rather than eccentrically camp. And everyone seems to be on the same page behind closed doors.
It’s so easy to watch a film that takes monumentally big swings like “Resurrection”You will give in to the temptation to reject it. Its power to shock is real and valid on its own terms.
It’s the sort of horror movie where a simple conversation can have you begging, in the back of your mind, for the scene to stop moving forward. Where the tiniest possibility that what we’re seeing is real is enough to put you off your lunch. However, before you realize it, you’re already screaming “Don’t go in there,”The film has already found a place in your discomfort and is poking at you with a knife.
“Resurrection”It will be shown for the first time at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.