Direction: Andrew Semans
Country: USA
The tension accumulated in Resurrection, Andrew Semans’ sophomore feature, doesn’t take you anywhere but a dead end where you are left with lots of unanswered questions. This psychological thriller tries to disturb with the wrong elements, and the film’s examination of traumatic maternity, physical and psychological abuse, and madness falls short.
Rebecca Hall doesn’t have a single bad scene in it, and yet the deliriously tedious story meanders towards an exaggerated conclusion that is almost drastically fun in a portentous sort of way. She is Margaret, a successful forty-something businesswoman and suffocating single mother who’s been living a peaceful, stable life for 22 years in Albany, New York. Before that, in her late teens, she was heavily brainwashed, intimidated and harmed by a much older boyfriend, David Moore (Tim Roth). When she first spots him in town, an uncontrollable fear, followed by a severe panic attack, takes hold of her. He came to demand a few more “kindnesses” from her, which are nothing but insane requests supposed to ease her pain from a guilty past.
A better script might have helped, but without it, this one shapes up as another manipulative nonsense that rarely dares to be smart. The characters don’t convince and the film ultimately frustrates by not knowing its own limitations. In the face of these predicaments, I’m actually upset about how little the movie even tried to escape inveterate clumsiness.
