Resurrection Review: A Deliciously Deranged Depiction of an Unraveling Mind

Andrew Semans’s Resurrection follows in the tradition of pulpy movies about women on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But while most of these types of stories hit familiar beats—generally revolving around a past trauma leading to the unravelling of a carefully maintained life—the psychological disintegration portrayed here plays out in a manner that steadily increases in macabre lunacy. And with Rebecca Hall as the film’s emotional anchor, Semans has an actor willing to boldly tackle this bracing madness head on.

Hall plays Margaret Ballion, a successful pharmaceutical company representative and single mother to the college-bound Abbie (Grace Kaufman). Margaret runs a tight ship at her office but also displays a compassionate side toward younger employees like Gwyn (Angela Wong Carbone), whom she coaches through garden-variety boyfriend troubles. Exhibiting no desires of her own for any kind of romantic relationship, Margaret prefers to engage in no-strings-attached sexual encounters with another co-worker, Peter (Michael Esper).

Throwing a wrench into this meticulously structured existence is a mysterious man from Margaret’s past named David Moore (Tim Roth). First catching a glimpse of him while at a business conference, Margaret is immediately agitated and quickly hurries toward the nearest exit. Then, when David starts appearing all over town, Margaret becomes convinced that it’s more than just a coincidence, and that the man poses some kind of threat to her life.

While Resurrection begins as a rather routine stalker story, it quickly morphs into something more thrillingly bizarre once Margaret finally decides to approach David. While initially acting innocently toward her, the man begins to subtly taunt her, until an alarm is set off when he reveals that he knows her daughter’s name. And then, as he gets up to leave, David signs off by cryptically rubbing his belly and telling Margaret, “Ben is here. Here inside of me.”

Recalling the grief-stricken widow that Hall played in The Night House, Margaret becomes consumed by anxiety. When she goes to the police, she reveals that she had been in a relationship with the significantly older David more than 20 years ago. But when Margaret finally tells the harrowing tale of this relationship, in a spontaneous confession to Gwyn, the account is so demented, concerning a sadistic Arctic-set affair that ends in the perceived cannibalistic murder of their infant son, that it strains credulity. Indeed, Gwyn can’t even begin to process the story, breaking down in a fit of panic and frantically asking, “Is this some kind of a joke?” But due to the intense conviction with which the tale is recounted, with Hall holding our attention in a vice-like grip as the camera remains on her face throughout, it’s impossible to deny that it comes, at least to Margaret, from a place of absolute truth.

As Margaret proceeds to stalk David herself, following him on lengthy walks around the city, Resurrection shifts into a more surreal register. Periodically, David halts so that they can come face to face, at which point he commands her to perform certain inane acts called “kindnesses”—something that Margaret did in the past to prove her worth to him. These consist of things like walking barefoot all the way to work, and while Margaret initially scoffs at his demands, she ultimately finds herself returning to her subservient ways—all under the puzzling pretense of David somehow allowing her to see their long-dead son again.

Margaret, perhaps inevitably, becomes spectacularly unhinged through all of this, trying to balance her determination to not disrupt the routine of her daily life with the inexplicable seduction of following David’s new set of rules. And through it all, Hall manages the tricky feat of keeping us absorbed by a character whose motivations vary chaotically from scene to scene.

Semans, who explored a less explicitly fraught but comparably oblique conflict in his debut feature, 2012’s Nancy, Please, keys the audience to Margaret’s perspective throughout so that we’re never quite sure what’s real or imagined. As a result, Resurrection becomes one of the more abrasive and intrinsically frightening evocations of a traumatized mind since David Lynch took us through the last week of Laura Palmer’s life in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. And as the supremely creepy David, Roth emerges as a diabolical spectre akin to Killer Bob, menacingly baring his gnarly teeth and continuing to insinuate that his dead son resides within him as he leads Margaret down a rabbit hole of chilling intimidation.

In its climax, Resurrection plunges full bore into body horror (shades of David Cronenberg or Andrzej Zulawski), with Semans positioning it as the natural next phase of Margaret’s mental collapse. What’s even more unnerving is the subsequent final scene, which presents for a moment a world where Margaret has triumphed over whatever “David” was. But trauma can’t be easily swept away with splashy violence, and as Margaret slowly realizes this truth, she looks straight into the camera, at us, silently pleading for a relief which may never come.