Stream It or Skip It: ‘Resurrection’ on VOD, A Different Breed of Abuse Horror

Resurrection, now available to rent or own on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video, traps the always-great Rebecca Hall in a familiar scary-movie mold, as an evil ex returns to resume the psychological torment she escaped all those years ago. But Andrew Semans’ careful, confident direction and a handful of unexpected choices in the script send this waking nightmare creeping down some grottier, less-trod narrative paths. Within what could’ve been a basic take on a stock setup, he leaves room for the grotesque, strange, and inexplicable. 

RESURRECTION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Every facet in the life of Margaret (Hall) revolves around discipline and control. She subsists on the sort of ambiguous matter identifiable only as ‘food’ by uppermost-echelon health freaks, keeps her daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman) on a tight leash, and gives the caliber of PowerPoint presentation that inspires a round of applause from everyone else at her biotech office. When she feels frisky, she summons a grateful married employee for a prompt bang, and he shows up with the same brisk efficiency as an Uber Eats order. But it’s no mistake that she runs with a desperate sort of urgency on her daily morning jogs, as if she’s fleeing something. There’s a vacuum of menace constantly on the periphery of her vision, until it’s all of a sudden filled by the exact thing that’s haunted her for decades: the glowering, grinning face of Tim Roth.

He plays the ex from hell, an abusive predator reappearing under the guise of mild-mannered innocence. The gaslighting and manipulations start before they even make contact, as he hovers and deliberately ignores her from just far enough away to make the police doubt her when she reports him. When he finally does make contact, the film immediately shifts on its axis, mutating from a bad-man psycho-thriller to something more layered and imaginative in its articulation of terror. She finds that the sway he once held over her has not totally been vanquished by her years of mental training, and begins to unravel as she tries to break a cycle of trauma with rapidly mounting desperation. Hall’s physical transformation over the course of her spiral is remarkable, conveyed not in simple weight loss but in the dimming of her eyes or the strain of her neck.

While she formulates a plan of counterattack to ensure the safety of herself and her daughter, her increasingly manic state alarms those close to her, the slow (and then quite swift) estrangement from Abbie serving as a sturdy structural pillar for the rest of the film. The final act’s leap into fantasy casts a pall of doubt on much of what’s come before, leaving us to sift through Margaret’s subjectivity and suss out how much of the peril was inflicted by her own brain — even if it had ample founding in real threats. The insidious methods by which malevolent people trick their prey into turning against themselves is the film’s secret weapon, placing us right inside the torture chamber of Margaret’s psyche as she repeatedly acts against her own interest. It’s harder to watch than any of the more flesh-rending set pieces waiting as the animosity between the leads boils over and flames up.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of: The recent update of The Invisible Man leaps to mind, a close cousin in its cruel fusion of grounded fears rooted in the dynamics of domestic violence to genre metaphors that interlace with and accentuate the story instead of detracting from it.

Performance Worth Watching: It’s the Rebecca Hall Show for long stretches of the film, including one showstopping monologue to be covered in greater detail very soon on this very site. But it takes two to tango in this dance of death, and Roth more than holds his own as a monster chilling in his composed calm.

Memorable Dialogue: Hall’s big monologue being too long to reproduce in full here, let’s instead go with her growled mantra of “I would do anything for my children! I am a champion!” As her daughter astutely notes later on in the film, she’s saying these words to convince herself and not because she believes it, though Hall delivers the line with enough conviction to blur those motivations.

Sex and Skin: Nothing too saucy. The scenes of Margaret and her non-boyfriend getting their rocks off have been purposely de-eroticized, in keeping with the strictly functional parameters she’s set for their casual relationship. For her, sex is just something to do, and Semans’ camera follows her unsentimental cues. (I was reminded of comic Kyle Kinane’s bit likening his masturbatory habits to grabbing a broom and shooing the raccoons off the porch.)

Our Take: So this may not technically be director Andrew Semans’ first feature — he did a little-seen indie called Nancy, Please ten years ago — but his self-assurance is nonetheless striking coming from someone with a relative lack of experience. Presumably, he spent the interim decade leveling up via a series of Rocky-style filmmaker training montages, because he and cinematographer Wyatt Garfield exert a subtle mastery over the intensifying tone of Margaret’s breakdown by keeping pace with her using crafty formal techniques. Her paranoia comes through in tracking shots that peer around corners and through multiple planes of focus, drawing us in to her insecurity. A simple tilt of the camera can make her look small and weak, or tall and empowered. The basic building blocks of the medium’s visual vocabulary get a good workout here, without Semans coming off as an ostentatious young talent too eager to prove himself.

This is to say that Resurrection never goes too far even as it pushes our suspension of disbelief further and further. Some have spoken out against the lack of hard logic in the surreal final confrontation between Margaret and her nemesis, which decisively breaks with the atmosphere of realism that dominates the first half of the film. If the script can’t answer all the questions it raises, that much is easily enough accounted for by the film itself joining Margaret in her madness, absorbing her loosening ability to distinguish fear from fact. Few films of this recent ilk spend as much time fixating on the processing of frightened panic rather than its generation; for one, Alex Garland’s Men wants so badly to be this film, so immediate in its rendering of misogynistic domination and how it distorts reason.

Margaret’s dissolution into a survival mode mistaken by many for hysteria is by no means an easy watch, particularly for those with any personal connection to the set of challenges she faces. It’s a far cry from the thrills-and-chills substrate of horror, even if its big set pieces do court the same kind of suspense and catharsis, offset by far graver and more plausible stakes. But anyone with an appreciation of strong fundamentals — editing that allows its most pregnant (no pun intended, you’ll get it) moments to breathe, unhurried acting from two thespians aiming for maximum excruciation, a camera that knows how to demonstrate agility and stop short of showing off — can put their faith in Semans to take the reins, even as he drags us across the emotional equivalent of broken glass.

Our Call: STREAM IT. It’s a different breed of abuse horror, uncommonly visceral and precise in its emphasis of the psychological element. The film seems familiar, or at least made from familiar components, but nonetheless conceals more lethal force than we realize at first. Just like a ghoul from the past, back with a vengeance.

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.