Although the story develops inconsistently, a captivating trauma-laced performance from Rebecca Hall and a confidently creepy supporting one from Tim Roth combines with an intense atmosphere in Andrew Semans’ feature to create a gripping horror story.
Margaret (Rebecca Hall) opens the film by confidently advising a young employee about the latter’s abusive relationship. However, as the film develops, the ghosts of Margaret’s traumatic history arrive in the form of David (Tim Roth). He terrorises her with their shared past and allusions to a son, the details of which are teased out across the film’s story.
From the offset, there is a looming atmosphere of dread that evokes a lingering feeling of unease from an abusive situation. Semans’ frame lingers on some Brutalist architecture; Margaret’s daughter, Abbie (Grace Kaufman), finds a tooth in her wallet; Abbie earns a massive gash in her leg after falling off her bike. During this period, Hall’s performance amps up the mania and paranoia. However, is it paranoia if someone really is out to get you?
When Tim Roth finally appears as the all-too-alive spectre of Margaret’s past, the film shifts gear visually and narratively. How Semans shoots a panic attack is frightening and disarming, with long tracking shots – disorientingly going from drab interior locations to exterior ones surrounded by tall buildings – offering an escalating sense of her need to get away from David. A ‘chance’ encounter with David in a department store uses a claustrophobically short focal length, with the sound design also adding to the effect.
The backstory of this ghastly relationship is teased out as the film goes on, but the scenes’ effectiveness is mixed. The more abstract and horrific leaps into Margaret’s fevered and fraying mind – with an oven-based one distressingly hard to shake – are the most effective. Still, other scenes eschew this obliqueness and tension for more explicit – and inelegant – exposition.
As Roth’s screen time builds, numerous callbacks put flesh on the bones of the abuse described earlier in the film. Between Roth’s confident creep and Hall’s increasingly frenzied turn, the atmosphere by the conclusion is as oppressive as the ‘kindnesses’ that David demands of Margaret.
The film’s finale is as gruesome as hinted at by the interactions to that point. The final confrontation is superbly paced and constructed, having tension ebb and flow in a gripping manner. RESURRECTION is most effective when allowing Hall and Roth’s very different types of intensity to pressurise the film psychologically, and the payoff is initially deeply satisfying.
The film then takes a lurch into gruesome ambiguity of questionable effectiveness. RESURRECTION is a film that slowly tightens its grip but lessens its final impact with odd decisions around when to be explicit and when to be more abstract. However, even if those choices are unevenly applied, Hall’s central performance rolls with each creative decision and is nothing short of terrifying.