The Reel Review
Just as her teenage daughter is preparing to leave for college, the carefully constructed life of a successful and extremely intense career woman starts to unravel when a shadowy figure from her troubled past suddenly reappears, in this dark psychological thriller/horror starring Rebecca Hall and Tim Roth.
Through her portrait of an increasingly unreliable narrator, Hall (The Night House, Godzilla vs. Kong) is the glue that makes this strange, murky story even remotely plausible, with an equally committed Roth (The Hateful Eight, Rob Roy) as her sinister tormentor. Hall’s eight-minute, single-take monologue halfway into the film is as impressive in her delivery as it is shocking. Writer/director Andrew Semans heightens the sense of despair and dread with muted, shadowy cinematography and a frenetic score.
There clearly is a lot of symbolism in Resurrection, about whether victims of trauma ever truly resolve their PTSD, as well as the complicated nature of parent-child relationships. But the story itself is just so weird for the sake of being weird, that its equally bonkers and ambiguous conclusion is more annoying than intriguing.
REEL FACTS
• Resurrection is the first film from writer/director Andrew Semans since 2012’s Nancy, Please.
• Rebecca Hall made her directorial debut in 2021’s Passing.
• Resurrection was filmed in Albany, New York.
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