365NEWSX
365NEWSX
Subscribe

Welcome

‘Resurrection’ Review: Rebecca Hall and Tim Roth Face Off in Impressively Deranged Psychological Thriller - IndieWire

‘Resurrection’ Review: Rebecca Hall and Tim Roth Face Off in Impressively Deranged Psychological Thriller - IndieWire

‘Resurrection’ Review: Rebecca Hall and Tim Roth Face Off in Impressively Deranged Psychological Thriller - IndieWire
Jan 23, 2022 2 mins, 36 secs

Fiendishly splitting the difference between the kind of low-rent parental vigilante movies that will always live on basic cable, and the kind of high-brow polymorphic freakouts that all but died with Andrzej Żuławski, Andrew Semans’ aptly named “Resurrection” may never quite reach “Possession” levels of psychic collapse (what does?), but it sure gets a hell of a lot closer than the broad familiarity of its setup might lead you to expect.

Even when Semans’ original script is punctured by occasional stabs of sickening horror — its control-obsessed heroine so unmoored by the sudden reappearance of a strange man from her past that she sees a baby-shaped chicken carcass screaming in the oven of her Albany condo — the film’s basic plot and deceptively bland aesthetic still make it feel like the kind of thing that Ashley Judd or Halle Berry might have made a couple of decades ago.

While “Resurrection” eventually offers its fair share of amateur surgery, the movie first gets under the skin because its jaw-dropping backstory is just plausible enough to belong to you or someone you love or even the badass single mom who works in your office, runs like Tom Cruise, rocks a form-fitting power suit during her corporate biology presentations, and blithely summons a married underling to her apartment for sex whenever she needs to feel like she has control over someone.

It’s a flex that lets us know we’re not in Kansas, anymore; that makes it clear once and for all this won’t be the kind of movie that rolls credits over a crane shot of David’s body lying on the ground while Margaret hugs her teenage daughter (Grace Kaufman) and the cops apologize for not taking her seriously.

On the contrary, it’s the kind of movie that composer Jim Williams decided to score as soon as he finished work on “Titane.”.

At the risk of overstating the extent to which “Resurrection” transcends the guilty pleasures of a typical thriller — or suggesting that its subdued direction is really a galaxy brain meta-commentary on the limits of control — Semans’ film stands out for how purposefully it seems to walk the line between schlocky crap and serious cinema.

The deviousness with which “Resurrection” uses that dynamic against Margaret — forcing her to surrender the soundness of her logic to the irrationality of her emotions — is so palpable that it carries Semans’ film through the dead air of its second act, and eventually pays off a slender plot that might have benefited from a bit more red meat on its bones.

None of this is her fault, and yet all of it will have to be confronted in order for Margaret to regain any measure of control, a tug-of-war that allows “Resurrection” to be a heady psychodrama one minute and a shout-at-the-screen romp the next on its way to an ending that hits both notes at the same time

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

RECENT NEWS

SUBSCRIBE

Get monthly updates and free resources.

CONNECT WITH US

© Copyright 2024 365NEWSX - All RIGHTS RESERVED