Rebecca Hall’s Stunning ‘Resurrection’ Monologue Is A True Showstopper

For the screenwriter, the monologue is a double-edged sword and must accordingly be wielded with care. When deployed in the right moment and in the right way, it’s a conspicuously impressive gambit, an opportunity to showcase a screenplay with something to say as well as the performance of the actor breathing life into the lines. But that conspicuousness of presence cuts both ways; a monologue with clunky writing or clumsy acting will drag and drag to kill all sense of a film’s momentum, its length turned from a feat into a punishment. It calls attention to its own import, and if the raw talent of the personnel can’t back up the gravity of the scene, the tone will come off as self-satisfied and ostentatious. Picture Interstellar, which is rocketing right along through the space-time continuum until Anne Hathaway starts blathering on about how “love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions,” and the whole movie comes crashing down.

What, then, makes Resurrection different? Writer-director Andrew Semans takes a big swing in the first hour of his new psychological horror film with a harrowing monologue delivered by star Rebecca Hall over a single unbroken eight-minute take, and rather than merely stopping the show, it’s a true showstopper. For all its virtuosic overtness, however, the moment doesn’t overreach for its gravity, instead letting the weight organically build to a crushing heaviness. More than upending our expectations for a script playing it stingy with information, the scene represents an opportunity for Hall to give a clinic on varied, engaging speechifying without getting up from her chair. The minimalism is the point, proving that more acting does not necessarily equate to better acting, a mistaken notion annually promoted by awards voting bodies. In low, controlled decibels, Hall commands our attention without demanding it. She shows us how to make a scene without, you know, making a scene.

As the tightly coiled Margaret, she’s spent the film up to that juncture carrying something immense and oppressive, evident first from the early morning jogs so intense that she appears to be running away from someone. We start to get scant glimpses of the man haunting her memory, the unsettling David (Tim Roth), sitting rows ahead at an industry-conference lecture or browsing several aisles away at a department store. The distance in these early shots also keeps the audience at an arm’s length, leaving us to speculate about her past with what a logical viewer would assume is an ex remembered none too fondly. 

A lifetime of movie-watching experience conditions this viewer to prepare for a mounting of tension and eleventh-hour reveal of the sum total of inner darkness contained within Margaret. Instead, the monologue lays all the narrative cards on the table, positing the disturbing notion that knowing will be more frightening than not. Semans’ bet pays off, too, because his protagonist is packing a whopper of a trauma. Rather than hiding the secret that Margaret bares for an intern on her way out late one night, he blows it wide open and then spends the rest of the plot developing our understanding of just how bad it can get. 

Much in the same way that the film itself feints toward a played-straight genre thriller until it veers off in a bizarre direction, Margaret’s monologue starts out as a story we’ve all heard before. She was young and hungry, traveling on research trips with her biologist hippie parents. (When she refers to them as “naive, stupid” people, Hall puts a little pepper on the hissing syllable in the second word, hinting at the resentment that’s made her such a pathologically caution mother.) It was on one of these trips that she met a man, an older and more confident man, who made her feel “important and appreciated” — for an eighteen-year-old, this means feeling like an adult, a seductive and powerful sensation. The first time Margaret mentions this man, before she can detail the depths of his malice, the camera stops cutting back to the intern she’s speaking to. She’s alone now, isolated, with everyone else blocked out.

As Margaret recounts the early days of their grimly inevitable relationship, Hall gives a faint smile and looks down into the middle distance, as if to convey being lost in a reverie for which she still holds some counterintuitive fondness. She’s still angry at herself for not knowing better, falling for this man who “went about it right” in gaining her family’s trust and a Svengali-like hold over her along with it. The mirthless chuckle Hall releases after she says “they just fell in love with him” gestures to decades of rage cooling into embittered amusement. All she can do is laugh, though she underplays this beat to keep the slow boil on pace. The story takes the obligatory turn for the bleak once she mentions that David had started plying her with wine and pills, confirming our worst suspicions about his intentions. But in her gaunt-eyed stillness foretelling a lower rock bottom, Hall tacitly warns that we haven’t seen nothing yet. 

So gradually as to be imperceptible without the aid of rewind and fast-forward buttons to show the contrast, Semans turns down the lights, dimming from a normal nighttime office scheme to a void of blackness in which Hall’s disembodied head seems to float. She’s breaking from reality along with her memory-self, who’s adrift in psychosis at this point in the sad yarn she’s telling. David’s sick games of abuse go to more abstract, exacting parts of the mind than the usual battering, the “kindnesses” he requests of Margaret specifically designed to break her. He carries out the misogynist’s desire to see his prey ‘barefoot and pregnant’ in a more literal capacity than most, before advancing to forced hours of meditation or ‘stress poses’ used by interrogators to extract intel from terrorists. During this passage, as things take a downturn, Margaret can’t bear to make eye contact with the person she’s ostensibly speaking to. Hall’s concentration, visible in her steady yet remote gaze, illustrates how transportive Margaret still finds these memories.

She fully falls into the image at the next tonal turn, once she divulges that David impregnated her during this time. She gives a faint smile as she speaks the word “pregnant” and gets a flicker of the joy and purpose that gestation brought her, living those days again, the distance between then and now shrinking. The flip side of that intimacy is the wounded stoicism of the next line, when she explains that David forbade her from giving birth and she gets another taste of that specific hurt. Dripping with hatred, she intones that “David wasn’t inspired any more,” and suddenly there’s another shift in the room’s dramatic pH levels. Everything she once got out of the relationship had gone, her imperative reduced to defense and survival. Only when talking about her sweet Benjamin, eaten by David at the first opportunity, does she first telegraph sadness.

The cannibalism and attendant body horror — David claims the infant child still lives on in his belly — lift the film into a surreal register out of joint with the human-scaled terrors, and Hall works that same pivot into her performance. She starts to detach from herself, her eyes growing vacant and unfocused. She quotes David again, but unlike the previous time (“He said he could see the future, that he could hear God whispering his name”), she uses the first person (“I ate him up,” she recalls him saying of helpless Benjamin). The lights darken even further, and we lose definition on the left side of her face, almost like she’s being eaten. She uses the brutal litotes of “very hard” to describe the ‘kindnesses’ becoming so extreme that she couldn’t physically withstand them any longer. For her, this lack of other options should justify the choice to leave him and the remnants of her child, imagined or not. But her unsureness on that matter, whether she abandoned her child, streaks her with grief and guilt that’s trapped her in a private prison of her own design. Only once she’s admitted this can she lift her head, look up, and reestablish eye contact. 

The metaphor doesn’t take too much parsing, Benjamin symbolizing the twisted love they once shared and that she can’t bring herself to expel in toto. But the space it occupies in the film’s atmosphere, wedged between cold realism and feverish hysteria, melds the figurative with the actual. Hall absorbs this discomfiting liminal balancing act and works it into her reads, which oscillate from the grounded to the unmoored in increments so small as to be imperceptible. Semans also won’t let us lock in one way or the other, bookending this shattering scene with something akin to a joke. The intern coaxes Margaret into sharing by claiming “I’m a really good listener,” only to mentally reject her nightmare as too much to process, ultimately offering a hilariously insufficient “feel better!” on her way out. 

The comic anticlimax of the scene fits with all that precedes it, which likewise undercuts the “impulse to be obvious,” as goes Richard Ayoade’s immortal nugget from The Souvenir: Part II. Hall never lashes out or breaks down, her composure a side effect of the absolute discipline required to survive David’s battery of torture. This eerie calm is far more honest and unsettling than all the howling in the world, in part for how it informs us that Margaret’s real pain laid in the inability to express that she felt it at all. Around David, she had to be the perfect partner, a self-stilling instinct that hasn’t left her. Like a bad relationship, which never goes from healthy to unhealthy in a linear fashion, her talking runs through peaks and valleys. All the while, she repeatedly reins herself in, holding back the flood of righteous fury to be unleashed at the grand finale. Restraint is the source of her power, in the film as in this standalone tour de force. As much as we might want to see an actor shake the rafters and play to the cheap seats, Margaret and Hall alike find strength in the refusal to give in.

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.