Margaret (Rebecca Hall) is a high-profile executive with her life in order, but when she is at home, a single mother to Abbie (Grace Kaufman) who is getting ready to leave for college, she finds it hard to cope with her daughter no longer being under her roof and protection.  Her fears for her daughter grow when, while at a medical conference, she sees a man who looks like David (Tim Roth), an abusive and manipulative man from her past.  With her daughter’s semester growing closer, Margaret finally approaches the man when she sees him again in the park, but in doing so she awakens unresolved trauma from their shared past, and while she tries to fight off his influence over her, she finds him just as persuasive and sadistic as ever. 

Andrew Semans writes and directs this old-school paranoia thriller, Resurrection, for IFC Films, released on Shudder.  At a tight 113 minutes, Semans keeps tensions high as Wyatt Garfield’s camera constantly interrogates an unflinching Hall.  Coupled with Jim Williams’ score and Ron Dulin’s editing, Resurrection places Hall in the same conversation as Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Isabelle Adjani in Possession (1981) as women whose world is closing in around them but refuse to lay down without a vicious fight.  It remains a brutal narrative throughout, but what is important to note is that it never crosses the line into exploitative territory as some of the paler imitations of the genre often do, relishing in the abuse and torture.   

Resurrection starts off simply enough, establishing Margaret’s status at the office and her relationship with Abbie, and even when things begin to get a little strange – a human tooth, root and all, which Abbie found in her bag one day – the film still seems to be painting by numbers on creating an unsettling atmosphere.  This all changes as the film turns into the second act and Hall delivers a massive monologue about her torrid past with David.  It is the crowning jewel of the film and a tour de force moment that will follow Hall for the remainder of her career as she spells out David’s brand of manipulative evil; his sadistic requests, the harrowing death of their young child, Benjamin, and how David would wield that loss as a weapon against Margaret in her grief. On a story level, it comes a little too early for how the film progresses because once David’s history is known to the audience, there is little room for his character to grow, but as a stand-alone moment of acting it is nothing short of incredible. 

Hall has a difficult ask from the script as unlike Farrow or Adjani who are fighting against supernatural forces, the threat of David and his manipulation is totally sapien.  This kind of torment is not new to film, one only needs to refer back to George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944) in which Ingrid Bergman is tormented to the brink of insanity by Charles Boyer; the title lending itself to the modern use of the word “gaslighting” which describes this act of prolonged yet subtle manipulation. These small acts of deception, while they add up to something much larger than just a few misremembered moments, can be tough to convey as cinema, being larger a visual medium, makes covering the mental torment a difficult performance for the actors to achieve.  It would be easy to overact in the role and steer the film into an unintentional comedy of errors, and without some of the absurdity of demon babies or the cult next door to hide behind, Bergman before, and now Hall, have to carefully meter their performance as their characters begin to crack. To the – and to use this word feels wrong, but – delight of audiences, they prove total mastery over the role.  They win the audience into their side so that as their respective films careen into their tempestuous finales, the regaining of their lives feels all the more triumphant and powerful because the danger was so much more “tangible” than a supernatural force. The danger was human. 

These insanity films need a formidable foe to work, and Roth is a terrifying force in Resurrection, even without the involvement of Satan and the supernatural. He remains calm throughout, and out of context, his performance could even be considered soothing as he works his charm back over Margaret and convinces her to perform some acts of “kindness” towards him in the form of difficult yoga poses held in the park until dawn, but we get the impressions that these acts can range from strenuous to humiliating and even self-mutilating. What makes the performance here work is that Roth finds moments of dynamism in an otherwise still role and while he maintains control over Margaret in the scenes they share, he allows Hall to drive the scene while he just plants the seeds of his desire into her mind. The character is dastardly with, unfortunately, no real clear motivation behind his actions other than that he can, and while Roth milks this role for every drop provided in the script, the inspiration runs out towards the end of the film. A simple role on paper that is complicated to perform, it is good fortune that someone as nuanced as Roth was cast, but there is simply not enough for him to do once the allure of danger and mystery wears off.  

By that point, Resurrection has taken a much more visceral turn away from the mind games, and while David is never not a threatening force in the film, audiences may find themselves bored by the lack of depth he, ultimately, is revealed to have. Semans has laid the plans and given himself many fruitful avenues of which to travel as he explores David and the “why” behind his actions, but in an apparent effort to keep things concise, the villain feels a little thin and Margaret a little too wily all these years removed from their initial relationship to fall right back into his same old tricks. David is strong, but Margaret is stronger, and without her needing to break free from him a second time there is no film, but David is written with capabilities more in line with their initial relationship and Margaret is written with more than enough sense about her to break free from him before he can even be given the chance to cast his net a second time. This is not to discredit or downplay the strength and resolve shown by real-life survivors of abuse, but within the context of the film, there is a misalignment between these two characters and how their stories influence their actions that leaves the narrative feeling a little tilted and off-center. The script is self-aware enough to recognize this, even giving Margaret moments where she identifies that she should not let David control him, but Semans does not take this opportunity to examine mental and phycological abuse in relationships and instead opts to go for something that is pulpy and perversely empowering. There is a reading of this film that David, instead of a traditional antagonist is more the symbol of grief and trauma, and that Resurrection is a parable of the pain of growth. If that is in fact the case, which does make for a stronger reconciling of the second half, it finds David a little too insidiously written for him to clearly track as a metaphor instead of a villain. 

Resurrection is powerful when it needs to be, but dull when it is not. Led by a strong duo of Hall and Roth, their performances help to carry much of the film, but there is little at work behind the edifice as once that fatal flaw is recognized, the film becomes overly tedious in its aimlessness and impenetrability. Like Roth’s David, the script’s simplicity is both a feature and a bug. It is an easy enough film to fall back into, and while audiences that do find themselves fading due to the monotony in the later half of the second act will have the tension built by the film lessened for them, they will not find themselves too lost at sea in the plot of it all when they do tune back in. Semans is scratching the itch at something truly great with his film – his sophomore feature and his first release in a decade – and proves he can work well with actors and craftspeople alike to bring forth a unified vision, there just needs to be a little more for everyone to latch on to and explore. While it is true that many-a thrillers fall apart as they seek to explain too much, and while it is also true that sometimes evil exists just because it can, it makes for too simple of a motivation and Resurrection is a film crying out for a third act reveal that fills in the strangeness of the middle act; some latent connection, some unknown token David has had in his back pocket, something, anything.