Resurrection film review — Rebecca Hall excels in horror about an abusive ex

One of the ongoing injustices of the awards season is that performances in genre films, especially horror, seldom get the recognition they deserve. That’s especially true when it comes to female actors playing the ones being terrorised. (Men playing monsters are often heaped with praise.)

In a just world, Lupita Nyong’o would have won all the prizes for Us (2019), Essie Davis for The Babadook (2014) and Toni Collette for Hereditary (2018). Now Rebecca Hall joins that list for her turn in the new movie Resurrection. It is a performance that contains immensities of emotion, corralled and expressed in minute movements of her face, posture and vocal delivery. It’s the best portrait of a woman fraying at the seams since, well, Rebecca Hall in The Night House (2020) or Christine (2016) before that.

In Resurrection, she plays Margaret, a sleek corporate executive based in Albany, New York, whose life is neatly compartmentalised, including the efficient affair she is having with colleague Peter (Michael Esper). That doesn’t get in the way of her being a loving single parent to her teenage daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman) and playing mentor to other young women at work, especially those coping with bad boyfriends.

Then one day she spots the worst boyfriend of them all, her ex from years past. David (Tim Roth) groomed her as a teen, bedded her once she came of age and held her in thrall so that he could force her to perform humiliating and painful abasements which he called, with hideous irony, “kindnesses”. This continued until he did something so unforgivable that she finally left. In one extraordinary monologue from Hall, Margaret reveals the whole back-story in all its insane detail to a young colleague, who promptly bursts into tears, wondering if this is some kind of corporate hazing. In fact, accepting the full loopiness of Margaret and David’s story represents a test of sorts for the audience too.

As he starts demanding new kindnesses, Margaret fears that history is repeating itself and that he will harm Abbie in some way. At the very least, the past will contaminate the present, an outcome Margaret cannot allow.

Writer-director Andrew Semans goes a little too far off the deep end with a weirder-than-David-Lynch climax that recalls Alex Garland’s thematically similar Men from earlier this year. (Add the star of that film, Jessie Buckley, to the list of actors giving outstanding and overlooked performances in horrors.) But Hall, with a great assist from Roth, manages to sell the ending through sheer thespian skill and force of will, producing something that lingers for days in the mind like a bad, grisly dream, and also says something profound about the scars left by abusive relationships.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from December 16 and online in the US now