Unresolved trauma can have an indelible effect on someone’s life even if they appear to have it all together on the surface. A new film starring Rebecca Hall uses the psychological thriller to examine just how extensively our past can derail our present when such trauma resurfaces.
Resurrection introduces us to Margaret (Hall), a successful career woman who tackles both her accomplished professional life and single motherhood to her fiercely independent teenage daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman). Margaret’s comfortable life is soon upended however when she sees a man she once knew, returned from the recesses of the past in which she thought she left him. Soon, Margaret begins to see David (Tim Roth) everywhere and her fears that he has re-entered her life through methodical stalking turns her into a paranoid recluse, worrying both Abbie and her co-worker/fling alike. Margaret must confront the monster she’s evaded for two decades who has come to conclude their unfinished business.
Resurrection does a good job in slowly developing Margaret as a character and peeling back the layers of her psyche, and thus, her behavior. We learn early that she is very overprotective as a mother and writer/director Andrew Semans’ script smartly and slowly unveils why. At its core, Resurrection is a film about the hold that our past can have on us, particularly when we don’t confront it. Margaret has attempted to hide both herself and Abbie from David and what she experienced with him as a young woman, believing that burying her bad experiences provided her with more power and control over her emotions than facing them head on. Because of this, even after two decades, David maintains a hold over her that resurfaces immediately upon her seeing him, causing Margaret to immediately revert to her younger, vulnerable, controllable self despite all she’s accomplished in her life since excising him from it.
David is of course a real person in this film, but what he represents through his actions and the coldly stoic and very good portrayal by Roth is the shadowy specter of a terrible past unconfronted, the monster that unresolved trauma can be in our lives, haunting us and lurking around every corner until addressed directly. Semans’ decision to write and shoot David as almost the knife wielding killer in a slasher film but from a psychological standpoint drives this point home and italicizes the psychological in psychological thriller. It makes the terror onscreen palpable while simultaneously strengthening the metaphor.
While this a thematically well done film, it is purely psychological and a methodical chronology of a woman’s descent into madness which can make it move at a slower pace in parts until the larger picture comes into focus. What keeps Resurrection from completely succumbing to this flaw is the performance of Rebecca Hall whose portrayal of a woman in crisis is masterful and sure to especially connect with those in the audience that can most closely relate to her experiences and her emotional and psychological reaction to them. Hall makes Margaret’s change from self assured girlboss executive to paranoid anxiety ridden young woman a believable one that sells the story and the character’s shadowy history with David. It’s truly an award worthy performance that would be more talked about moving forward this upcoming awards season if it didn’t take place in a small indie film. Hall’s range and ability to pull viewers emotionally are on full display.
Resurrection is a film with a good concept centering around an interesting psychological thriller angle that can be a bit too slow and methodical in unraveling the story. Helping it along is a superb performance from Rebecca Hall who unleashes her acting skill in full, portraying a woman in crisis and the mental effects of lasting trauma in a way that engrossing and visceral. She is buoyed by Tim Roth’s more subtle but still terrifying antagonist that compliments her perfectly. The two performances and effectiveness of the psychological thriller aspect of a woman descending into madness tilt this film in the direction of being an interesting watch.
Image: IFC Films
