Resurrectionis now available to rent or own on VOD platforms such asAmazon Prime Video. We're trapping the always-amazing Rebecca Hall in a familiar scary movie. The evil ex-boyfriend is back, resuming the mental anguish she escaped years ago. This waking nightmare creeps down a more grotesque and untrodden narrative path. In what could be a rudimentary look at the stock setup, he leaves room for the grotesque, strange and inexplicable.
Resurrection: Stream or skip.
Bottom Line: Every aspect of Margaret (Hall)'s life revolves around discipline and control. She survived the sort of obscure problem identifiable only as "food" by top-tier health freaks, keeping her daughter Abby (Grace Kaufman) on a tight leash and keeping her away from everyone else. Provides the ability to applaud PowerPoint presentations. in her biotech office. When she's in a bad mood, she summons a grateful married employee for a quick bang, and he shows up with as brisk efficiency as her Uber Eats order. But there's no question that she runs with a desperate sense of urgency in her daily morning jog, as if she's running away from something. There is a constant vacuum of threat around her vision, until it suddenly fills with the exact thing that has haunted her for decades, the glowing, grinning face of Tim Roth.
He plays an abusive predator who reappears from Hell under the guise of good-natured innocence. Her gaslighting and her manipulations caused them to come into contact because he hovered from a distance enough to make her police suspect her when she reported him, and her willfully ignoring her. It starts before When he finally makes contact, the film quickly shifts along its axis, morphing from a villainous psychological thriller to something more layered and imaginative in its presentation of horror. Realizing that the influences that controlled her have not been completely overcome by her years of mental training, she begins to unravel as she seeks to break the cycle of trauma with her rapidly mounting despair. Hall's physical changes during the course of the process were notable, manifesting in blurred vision and neck strain rather than simple weight loss.
She ensured the safety of herself and her daughter. but her increasingly manic state alerts those close to her, and the slow (and very rapid) estrangement from Abby The rest of the film acting as a sturdy structural support. The final act's leap into fantasy casts doubt on much of what has happened so far, sifting through Margaret's subjectivity and having to guess how much danger was inflicted by her own brain. The insidious methods of unscrupulous people tricking their prey into turning against themselves are the film's secret weapon, and inside Margaret's mental torture chamber when she repeatedly acts against her own interests. put us in Harder to watch than any of the more flesh-tearing setpieces where the animosity between the leads is waiting to boil and flare up.
What movies remind you of: The recentThe Invisible Man update comes to mind increase. An underlying fear rooted in the dynamics of domestic violence and genre tropes brutally blend together, intertwining and emphasizing the narrative instead of the narrative. spoil it.
Notable performance: Rebecca Hall shows in a long stretch of the film. This includes her one eye-opening monologue which will be covered in detail soon on this very site. But it takes two to tango in this dance of death, and Ross more than holds his own as a chilling monster in his subdued composure. Memorable Dialogue: Hall's monologue is too long to be fully reproduced here. Instead, "I'll do anything for my kids. I'm a champion." Saying it to convince himself, Hall offers the line with enough conviction to obscure those motives.
Sex and Skin: Not too cheeky. The scenes in which Margaret and her non-boyfriend unlock are deliberately de-eroticized, in keeping with the strictly functional parameters she has set for her casual relationship. Sex is just about doing, and Semans' camera follows her emotionless cues. (I remember Kyle Kinane in the comics likening his masturbation habit to grabbing a broom and shooing raccoons off a balcony.)
Our opinion: So maybe this isn't exactly directed by Andrew Seamans. The first feature — he produced the little-seen indies Nancy, Please ten years before him — yet his confidence came from someone with relatively little experience. It is impressive. Perhaps he spent his decade in between leveling up through a series of Rockystyle filmmaker training his montages. official technique. Her paranoia manifests itself in tracking shots that peer into multiple focal planes around corners, drawing us into her angst. It makes you look powerful. The basic building blocks of the medium's visual vocabulary make for good training here, and Semans doesn't come off as a flamboyant young talent who's too eager to prove himself.
This means that theresurrection pushes the suspension of our disbelief even further, but never goes too far. Some object to the lack of hard logic in the surreal final confrontation between Margaret and her nemesis, which definitively breaks the atmosphere of realism that dominates the first half of the film. If you cannot answer the Few movies spend much of their time processing rather than generating the panic that hits. For one thing, Alex Garland's Men aspires to be this movie.
Margaret's dissolution into survival mode, misinterpreted by many as hysteria, is by no means an easy watch, especially for those who have a personal connection to the series of challenges she faces. Even if its big set-pieces evoke the same kind of suspense and catharsis, offset by far more serious and plausible stakes, it's a far cry from the thrills and chilling underpinnings of horror. Anyone who appreciates it — a breathtaking compilation of the most pregnant (no pun intended, but you'll get it) moments, by two actors aiming for maximum pain Leisurely acting, a camera that shows agility and knows how to stop Can't show off — even when he's dragging us into something as emotional as shards of glass, take the reins You can put their trust in Semans for
OUR CALL: Stream it. It's a different kind of abuse horror, very visceral and precise in its emphasis on the psychological component. The film looks familiar, or at least seems to be made with familiar components, and yet it hides a more deadly force than you might first realize. Like the ghouls of the past, they have returned with vengeance.
Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic based in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has appeared in his New York Times, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and many other semi-reputable publications. His favorite movie is Boogie Nights.
