RESURRECTION 18
Ghost of boyfriend past…
★★★★★ OUT NOW DIGITAL
After delivering a standout meltdown in 2020’s The Night House, Rebecca Hall returns to horror with Resurrection. Her searing portrayal of deep-set trauma is the kind of all-in performance that might attract awards traction, were it not in a genre movie. And she only gets more committed as events spiral wildly in a grisly final act.
Margaret (Hall) enjoys a settled life: she works at a pharma company and is close with 17-year-old daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman, The Sky Is Everywhere). Then she spots David (Tim Roth, genuinely unnerving) and her face crumples. An audacious one-take, sevenminute monologue tells us exactly what David is to her, and why,
20 years ago, she worked so hard to escape him.
Shot in muted colours and favouring slow-burn drama infected by creeping dread, Andrew Semans’ unsettling film uncovers a relationship of savage toxicity. Roth, underplaying, is memorably ghastly. But this is Hall’s film, her Margaret wavering between flight and fight, paralysed terror and lashing fury. “Fucking men,” she spits to the married colleague with whom she’s having casual sex. “You can’t stick your dick in anything without deciding that you love it or you hate it.”
The big-swing finale, entering full-on ‘metaphorror’ territory, will lose some viewers (and Academy voters, no doubt), but no one will forget it: Resurrection lives on long after the credits roll.