Somewhere close to the top of “Resurrection,” a glossy, hurtling, ridiculously entertaining horror film from Andrew Semans, there’s a scene of such gruesomely bonkers intent that I really gasped. And then I laughed, tickled by how simply Semans and his star, the charismatic Rebecca Hall, had persuaded me to put money into their lunatic shenanigans.
But then Hall — as confirmed in final yr’s creep-out, “The Night House” — has a knack for pumping gravitas into considerably batty narratives. Here, she performs Margaret, an government in some type of pharmaceutical outfit, and from the beginning we discover an depth that verges on obsessiveness. Whether at work or because the protecting single mom to her teenage daughter, Abbie (Grace Kaufman), Margaret is a mannequin of calculated management. Even her intercourse life is rigidly regulated, the liaisons together with her married co-worker, Peter (Michael Esper), unfolding with extra effectivity than pleasure. It’s not that Margaret is chilly — greater than as soon as, we see her empathetically counsel a younger intern to depart an emotionally abusive boyfriend — it’s simply that she appears completely on guard.
But in opposition to what? Clues begin to accumulate. Abbie, who’s about to depart for faculty, finds a human molar in her pockets. Later, the sight of a mysterious man in a lecture room causes Margaret to blanch and shake, as if she has seen a ghost. More than 20 years earlier, she was concerned with this man, David (Tim Roth), and the connection has left her, fairly actually, scarred. Now, he appears to need one thing, exhibiting up randomly with out approaching her till, terrified, she accosts him. His vulpine grin reveals a lacking tooth.
As we’re about to be taught, David is greater than a heel, he’s a hellion, and what begins because the story of a stalking skids quickly into depravity and humiliation. And when Margaret’s rigorously cultivated life begins to crack — she’s sniping at colleagues and fiercely monitoring Abbie’s actions — “Resurrection” teases a well-recognized fable of feminine disintegration. But Semans, who debuted in 2013 with the cheeky psycho-comedy, “Nancy, Please,” is simply too assured an explorer of twisted minds to accept cliché. The discount that David hopes to strike with Margaret regarding a long-ago tragedy is unbelievable, unthinkable, insane. Yet Roth’s eerily nonetheless physique language and quietly sinister line readings choke the urge to snigger. He’s a magnetic sadist.
Encouraged by Jim Williams’s unsettling rating, Hall and Roth convincingly promote their characters’ sick psychological bond. So whereas “Resurrection” harbors a couple of theme — empty-nest anxieties, poisonous males and the lengthy tail of their manipulations — the film feels extra like an unhinged take a look at of how far into the loonyverse the viewers may be persuaded to enterprise.
That’s why Hall’s skin-prickling, 7-minute monologue early within the movie is so crucial. As the display darkens behind her and her pale face fills the body, she recounts Margaret and David’s horrifying historical past with irresistible sincerity. It’s the proper setup for an ending of such scrumptious ambiguity it was all I might do to not applaud.
Resurrection
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters.
