Resurrection was reviewed out of the Sundance Film Festival, where it made its world premiere.
Resurrection is an audacious psychological thriller that wears its most discomforting aspects and images on its sleeve. It follows Margaret (Rebecca Hall), an overbearing mother and authoritative pharmaceutical professional, whose life begins to slowly unravel when she spots the mysterious David (Tim Roth), a man she believes is a figure from her past. Written and directed by Andrew Semans, the film is a blend of methodical execution and untamed performances, with both Hall and Roth delivering career-best work in a story of resurgent trauma that’s as excitingly energetic as it is horrifically sad.
Margaret’s life is about maintaining control. Her morning run is purposeful. Her affair with her co-worker helps her blow off steam. Her romantic advice to her intern — whose relationship has red flags that Margaret recognizes — is blunt and to-the-point. However, her sheltered teenage daughter, Abbie (Grace Kaufman), is on the verge of leaving for college, so the prospect of being a single empty-nester doesn’t sit well with her, if only because it means she can no longer protect Abbie from the harsh realities of the world. When Abbie gets into a bicycle accident, it triggers a ferocious maternal instinct within Margaret, which comes off as cloying and suffocating to Abbie. However, Margaret — thanks to Hall’s performance, and the way she allows lingering insecurities to pierce her delicate armor — appears to have hidden reasons for her paranoia, though she refuses to discuss them.
A specter of Margaret’s past eventually emerges in the form of David, a man she’s convinced she knows, but even before he appears on screen, Hall’s performance paints a desolate portrait of a woman trying to outrun her traumas. The present which she has fashioned for herself offers a sense of temporary calm; Semans and cinematographer Wyatt Garfield capture her in still and clinical frames with the overexposed white lighting of a drab office building, while the palette created by the costume and set designs (by Alexis Forte and Anna Kathleen respectively) is filled with muted grays. It’s all centered. Normal. Unremarkable — that is, until David enters the picture. The camera slowly comes unglued from its fixed vantage, moving unpredictably to follow Margaret as she tries to keep a lid on sudden panic attacks. She begins behaving erratically in public when she believes David is near, and when the camera follows her in unbroken takes — the kind of tracking shots that usually maintain clarity and geography — it employs a long lens that leaves her surroundings out of focus, blurring her perspective.
When Margaret first confronts David, their conversation doesn’t make much sense. It feels chopped up and jumbled in time, creating a distinct lack of clarity as to whether she’s being manipulated and gaslit, or her perspective is unreliable to begin with. After all, the thought of being unable to protect Abbie forever has, by this point, sent her into an emotional tailspin. Then again, the mystery of Margaret’s narrative point of view is one the movie also plays with in inventive fashion, affording both Hall and Roth some truly remarkable scenes. (Kaufman, for her part, brings a fun lightness to Abbie, though this slowly turns to subdued fear and suspicion about her mother’s state of mind).
Before long, Margaret becomes a ferocious, wounded animal. Her words become venomous to those around her, and where she was once centered, her body language becomes sprawling and uncontrolled, as she tries to convince Abbie that staying indoors is for her own good. In a standout scene, Hall even delivers a painful monologue in a lengthy, unbroken closeup that snaps Margaret’s entire story into focus (though its “tell, don’t show” nature also casts a sliver of doubt). Meanwhile, David — as seen through Margaret’s eyes — is downright spine-chilling, as Roth maintains a courteous demeanor while navigating some truly disturbing material.
The longer the film goes on, the more it toys with Margaret’s perspective (and thus, our own), offering snaking twists and turns up to the very last minute. However, the story’s surprising pivots aren’t its only constant; Hall herself tumbles slowly down a winding rabbit-hole, growing more withered, more unhinged and more unpredictable with every passing scene. Whatever the facts of Margaret’s past, and to whatever extent she believes them, these end up wholly irrelevant in the face of the devastating emotional honesty with which Hall approaches even the story’s most head-spinning moments (which make for a fascinating B-side to her work in The Night House).
Lesser actors may have allowed Resurrection to slip into trashy territory, but Hall and Roth throw everything they have into their respective roles, resulting in a work that yanks you by the collar and whispers its most deranged and violent ramblings mere inches from your face, until you have no choice but to submit. Though when the smoke clears, and when fact and fiction are picked neatly apart, all that’s left are gaping emotional wounds from long in the past. To fill them, the film sends Margaret, and Hall, to some volatile and deeply vulnerable places that are hard to come back from, especially in its shocking climax.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/3tVPkbt
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