Resurrection (2022)

Score: 4 / 5

Rebecca Hall deserves so many more chances to headline elevated psychological horror, because between The Night House and now this, she's one of the best leading women in the genre. I sat down for Resurrection knowing nothing beyond its genre label, release date, and her name, and truthfully that's probably the best way to approach this film. It's a wild ride, one that is playing multiple games with itself and with us at the same time. While I won't necessarily recount the plot in my thoughts here, there will be spoilers -- because anything said about this movie is a "spoiler" -- so if you're at all interested in it, please stop reading and go watch it as soon as you can. 

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First things first: Rebecca Hall's Margaret is not a likable woman. We first meet her offscreen, as a young woman sits in her office telling her relationship woes to Margaret like to a confessor. When the camera cuts to her, she's seated uncomfortably perched on the edge of her desk in a pose straddling aggressively dismissive and forced casual. She tells the young woman -- a peer, colleague? An employee, assistant? Who knows! -- in striking, dominant terms that her boyfriend is a "sadist," using a tone of voice indicating that she knows all and there can be no alternative opinion. We all know someone like this, who is either too walled-off to properly relate to others or who is too wounded and hurt to have compassionate perspective. That doesn't stop Margaret from being immediately off-putting.

This translates outside of the workspace, where she has some illustrious job in biotechnology where she leads presentations on replacement therapy and the reorganization of cells. At home, she's a single mother of Abbie (Grace Kaufman), hovering and clinging and controlling as Abbie gets ready for college. Her household and her lifestyle are held prisoner by her sense of routine; for example, she takes a daily run that looks like boot camp (thanks to cold cinematography and icy editing), and in her house she's always either cleaning the spotless surfaces or lounging in a bathrobe while still dripping from her shower. She's kind of alone in this palatial existence -- beautiful production design subtly underscores her isolation and clinical minimalism -- and so she determinedly engages in a friends-with-benefits relationship with a married coworker. Well, "friends" with benefits, as she doesn't let down any emotional walls with him and only treats him like a transactional fuck-buddy despite his conflicted desires for her.

At a work conference, Margaret sees a man and everything changes. We won't learn who he is for some time, but she becomes agitated and sweaty, hyperventilating before she gets home and all but forbids Abbie from doing anything. Abbie naturally chalks it up to Margaret's looming empty nest syndrome, but there's a lot more going on, and as Margaret learns about strange things Abbie's been experiencing, her paranoia worsens. Abbie found a tooth in her wallet; Abbie got in an accident while riding a bike under the influence; they go to the mall and the man appears again before Margaret forcibly flees with Abbie. I thought this movie was about to become a story about the ways past trauma affects mother-daughter relationships in a world of predatory patriarchy, something between Women Talking and Alice, Darling, and I was ready for it. After all, generational trauma and mental illness are very much in vogue in our era of "elevated horror."

Then Margaret, in a roughly seven-minute monologue to the young coworker from the opening scene, reveals what's happening. The man she saw at the conference and the mall was David (Tim Roth), her ex from twentysomething years earlier, who she met at 18 and moved in with. He quickly became controlling and abusive, forcing her to self-harm and humiliate herself in acts of "kindnesses" to be worthy of his love and resources. When she eventually had a son, Ben, David became jealous to the point of possibly (probably) murdering him. To escape her blame, he tells her a lie so insidious, so cruel, so absolutely batshit crazy that some bizarre, manipulated, pained part of her broken consciousness believes him. Margaret's dedicated use of "sadist" earlier is finally made clear.

At this point in the film, the audience is asked for a crucial choice. We're either meant to think she's on the brink and completely untrustworthy, or to think compassionately for her experience and suffer the delusional aftereffects of abuse with her. This isn't a normal story of abuse -- disgusting, isn't it, that there is a "normal" or socially accepted understanding of typical abuse patterns -- like we've seen before. This is unhinged, totally bonkers stuff, and it's only though the filmmakers' calculated approach and artistic integrity that Margaret's revelation doesn't derail the whole movie. And it's from this moment, whatever we choose to feel and think, that the film changes its approach and plot, spinning violently into a psychological spiral between Margaret and David in which we're never sure who is the cat and who is the mouse, who is scarier and more potentially evil. Of course he is a pure monster, one that Roth is all too gleefully malicious to bring to life, but she's on the threshold of losing touch with reality entirely, through absolutely no fault of her own. 

The second half of this movie is the kind of psychological horror I love but has become quite rare these days; now, psychological horror is all about trauma and mental illness and always (always) carries some metaphorical monster who is also very real. Movies like Silent House and Black Swan and The Silence of the Lambs where the horror starts and ends in the minds of the protagonist and their adventure through a broken world are few and far between, but this one fits in their vein without the timely trappings of hot topics. As such, Resurrection is not a pleasant viewing experience; there are no "gotcha!" jump scares, no gory excesses to giggle about, no stylized monsters or mythology to unravel. There is just cruelty and menace and realistic -- if insane -- abuse. This is not the story of an abused woman getting revenge on her abuser. Not really. By the end, we don't know to what extent we can trust her as things get hallucinatory and almost supernatural (think along the aesthetic lines of Villeneuve's Enemy and Aster's Beau is Afraid), and/or to what extent she is suffering a breakdown. Then again, has she been trustworthy the whole time, or even sane? We are forced to relate to her perspective by the screenplay, editing, and cinematography, and we certainly want to because it's Hall and she's amazing. And there's a moment near the end, as David discusses himself and their relationship, when anyone who's ever been in an abusive relationship will relate a little too closely to the terrifyingly accurate language and ideas being used.

There's a lot to like about this movie for anyone interested in these topics. But it won't be for everyone, both in terms of concepts and content. The end will surely polarize even interested viewers, both because of the depraved darkness to which this movie sends us and because it goes for the gusto in terms of unhinged insanity for its finale. But it sticks to its guns, refuses to comfort us, and pushes us into a mindset I haven't experienced in a film in ages. Daring and fresh, haunting and nasty, this movie is unique and brave and wild, and I respect the hell out of it. Even if I may never choose to watch it again.