In Resurrection, Rebecca Hall continues her horror renaissance
Working with writer-director Andrew Semans, Hall vividly plays a woman who's capable of anything—except escaping her ex-boyfriend's control
Film Reviews Rebecca Hall
Think back to Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. We know Richard Dreyfus’ Roy Neary isn’t crazy, we were right there when he saw the blinding lights. But in life, when someone starts coming apart, rambling about visions and supernatural forces, the proper thing to do is urge them to seek help. Movies like Resurrection are terrific because they blur the line between how you’d act in reality and what’s appropriate for a film.
Resurrection stars the always outstanding Rebecca Hall, in peak form as an exec at a biotech company. Her character, Margaret, lives in an apartment as a single mother whose daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman) is prepping to leave for college. Margaret seems content with the purely physical hookups she shares with a married coworker (Michael Esper). She’s tough and decisive at work, where she’s almost idolized by an intern (Angela Wong Carbone). Her community features folksy diners on one block, soulless parking lots on the other, and right around the corner, terrifying modern buildings that seem borrowed from Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes. (The movie is shot in Albany, New York, a strangely cinematic burg that does extraordinarily well in close-up here.)
Writer-director Andrew Semans is quick to show cracks in the facade of her competency, especially when Margaret unexpectedly catches a glimpse (that is him, right?) of David (Tim Roth) sucking his teeth and looking up to no good. Weird visions follow. Some are dreams (a baby in the oven: unpleasant!) and some are real (a tooth in Abbie’s pocketbook: not quite as bad, but certainly perplexing!). But after enough of David’s uninvited encounters, Margaret contacts the police—who can do nothing, despite her confession that he is Margaret’s ex-boyfriend, missing for two decades, and she’d very much like it if he stayed away.
With David back in town, Margaret’s nerves quickly fray, and Abbie getting in an accident doesn’t help matters. Margaret is clearly a victim of some kind of abuse, but exactly what went down—and how David so easily puts her back under his thumb—is the hook of this movie that we will take every measure not to spoil. The twist may shake loose some audience members who like to stick with reality, but supernatural horror fans will dig it. They may even think, “Gee, I’ve never quite seen that before!”
All is revealed in a tour-de-force monologue between Margaret and her intern, which plays out in one of those scenes you don’t realize is a single take until after it’s over. Even after all of this time apart, David maintains an unsettling hold over Margaret, and he’s able to manipulate her in degrading ways. She begins walking around town barefoot, just because of his (literal) marching orders. Her daughter and quasi-boyfriend try to intervene (or at least get her to realize that she is behaving irrationally), but to use the Close Encounters example from above—what if the alien was actually real?
By the third act, Hall plunges further into the cuckoo nature of the performance; it’s not something one could do in half-measures. (She is credited as one of the executive producers.) For what will surely be catalogued as a horror film, there isn’t much gore—right up until the moment that there is, anyway. Semans opens the movie with very clean lines and spare interiors, all to descend into glorious mayhem by the end.
The most terrifying thing, however, is how seeing how a clearly intelligent, capable person can be so quickly reduced to an automaton with the snap of someone’s finger. (And Tim Roth isn’t even handsome in this—he’s a gross slob with a potbelly, and that’s even an important plot point!) We’ve all known wonderful people who for whatever reason just won’t drop their loser significant other, and we can’t figure out why. Resurrection takes this to dark and vicious extremes, and the image of a dazed Rebecca Hall wandering around Albany without shoes works as a mundane symbol for this all-too-common kind of madness.
23 Comments
I can’t process Rebecca Hall is at the age where she can plausibly (?) play the mom of an 18 year old. She just always seems 30-ish. Saw the preview for this and it looks great, love a good psychological thriller.
If you have a baby as a teenager, then you’re still in your thirties when they’re 18.
Rebecca Hall has the same thing as Julia Robert had where she looked in 30s in her 20s but in her 40s she still looked in 30s.
Yeah I hear you. But she was 30-ish when playing the bad guy in Iron Man 3 decade ago.
I guess black don’t crack even when you’re passing.
Yeah she doesn’t seem to age. But she IS 40 so having a kid at 22 is entirely OK. But Hall doesn’t look a whole lot different than she did in the Prestige and that was what, 15 years ago?This movie looks like it might be terrific; in the same mode as her awesome and creepy “the Night House” from a couple of years ago.
The Night House seriously disturbed me due to Hall’s performance. The plot had a lot of threads and probably would be a less memorable movie if she hadn’t been cast.This looks great. She plays despair so very accurate.
Same here, I liked Night House even if I had to make my own connections to what happened in the end but her performance of someone whose life is shambless by the monster which is grief was fucking great!I will see this movie just because of her performance in Night house.
100% agree. Oh man, was that movie unsettling.
Hall was mesmerizing, as per usual.
But even though I love thrillers, and the climax did not totally make sense to me (the core pretext is…darkly absurd) which usually provides an intellectual depressurizer, ever revisiting that film is a firm NOPE.
Maybe it was just unpleasant, ultimately.
HIGHly recommend “The Gift”, though.
Joel Edgerton wrote and directed that brilliant, nasty little noir, and her slow-dawning is utterly devastating.
HIGHly recommend “The Gift”, though.
Joel Edgerton wrote and directed that brilliant, nasty little noir, and her slow-dawning is utterly devastating.The Gift rules up until, like, the last 20 minutes, but yes: Rebecca Hall is so good in it.
I think the scene at the bar where she reads her husband’s suicide note is some of the best acting in recent years. absolutely tremendous performance
We’ve all known wonderful people who for whatever reason just won’t drop their loser significant other
I don’t think I know such people, but then I’m not much of a people person. It doesn’t seem plausible at all for that to apply to someone who’s been gone for decades and she went to the police about when he showed up.
Who do we complain to about the opening of new tabs everytime we click on article?
This shot reminds me of the scene in Pulp Fiction when Pumpkin and Honey Bunny decide to rob the diner. I wonder if this was a conscious homage or just a coincidence…
Definitely just a coincidence, if it was filmed from the same angle I’d say maybe? But this is just the standard way of shooting a conversation at a table.
That, and I can think of at least one other movie and a TV series where Roth had conversations in a diner.
You’d think if it were intentional they wouldn’t have flipped it, but maybe.
“. . .and then when I go outside, this weird dude pops out from behind the dumpster and scares me!”
LOVE Rebeca Hall in nearly everything she’s done (especially in “Vicky Christina Barcelona”) and this movie looks like it could be great.But what stuck out the MOST is…how much the (great) plodding synth-bass line theme sounds like the theme from “Prince of Darkness”: (The theme kicks in just before the 1:00 mark.)Low-key reference, or just anthropological coincidence? (Or am I just sitting in front of this computer WAY too much?) 😀
yeah, I hear you. Maybe not a specific reference or a coincidence, but split the difference and just call it a Carpenteresque sound? Man, “Prince of Darkness,” total gem. I’ve never figured out why it doesn’t seem as well-liked by Carpenter fans… It does so much with such minimal means, and is really the height of Carpenter’s ability to invest real-life urban locations with apocalyptic dread…
Well, mainly because, instead of making it a completely intellectual terror experience (which would have been absolutely *harrowing*), he felt the need to throw a bunch of slasher-flick shit in there (which was de-rigeur for the era).Honestly, this would make a FANTASTIC limited mini-series; like, 6-8 episodes, a lot of background on the mythic/dreamscape priesthood + the alien/future civilization info, with a little character/relationship development between the college students in-between, it could be AMAZING.
As someone who saw the movie at Sundance and came away thinking it was well-acted macabre nonsense, I find this take interesting. I also don’t want to give anything away, so I’ll just say this: I wonder if I would’ve liked it better if I agreed that the twist was genuinely supernatural.
A strange and interesting movie! Hall is superlative, of course, although Roth was a little too de rigeur nice-soothing-voice-gaslighter for my taste. There were parts of it that made me curious to see a movie about a deeply fucked-up BDSM relationship. It has a vaguely anonymous sheen to it, which makes the Thing That Happens all the more batshit. I still don’t know what was up with the flashing light in the window.