Written and directed by Andrew Nemans
Starring Rebecca Hall, Tim Roth, Grace Kaufman, Michael Esper, Angela Wong Carbone
Runtime: 1 hour 43 minutes
Unrated
In theaters July 29, on demand August 5

by Audrey Callerstrom, Staff Writer

When it comes to films, I’ve given more thought lately to who exactly is telling the story. Do they have an understanding, a sensitivity toward the perspective of their characters? This is especially true for dramas. For example, originally Bo Burnham faced some criticism for Eighth Grade. After all, he’s trying to tell the perspective of a young girl; Burnham is a 30-something male. But he seemed to go out of his way to work with and understand his lead, Elsie Fisher, so that the film was sweet and earnest. Similarly, The Worst Person in the World told the story of a young women and it was written by two men, Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt. But the characters were complex, and the human truths were universal.

What does that have to do with Resurrection, a psychological drama starring Rebecca Hall? Because in spite of Hall’s always excellent acting, even in the smallest of roles, ultimately her character, Margaret, never feels like a real, actualized person. Writer/director Andrew Nemans gives her a few obvious traits. She’s a single mom, a workaholic. She runs, she keeps it tight, she counsels a colleague (Angela Wong Carbone) on her personal life, so she’s compassionate. She has an ongoing affair with a married coworker (Michael Esper). But a mysterious, traumatic past unearths itself. She has a nightmare of a charred baby in an oven. Her daughter, Abbie (Grace Kaufman) finds a tooth in her wallet one day. Later that evening, Abbie gets in a gruesome bike accident. This sense of loss of security comes to a head when David (Tim Roth) shows up at a work conference of hers, and a lot of other places, too. Margaret’s gruesome and traumatic past is largely attributable to David, who was violent towards her and blames her for the loss of their child.

Roth makes for an eerie villain, and there is an electricity in his scenes with Margaret, but it’s hard to stay invested as the movies goes along. A confessional monologue from Margaret about what happened with David goes on or for too long and is too vague to be engaging. The issue here with Margaret as a character is that, without a script to back it up, Resurrection makes it so that Margaret’s trauma is her defining characteristic. And Newmans seems perfectly OK with that. There’s no way to know if the film would have been better if it was written/directed by a woman, but I think it would have been a little more careful. Hall is a strong performer who can hold her own in pretty much any genre (even against King Kong!) but she’s wasted on the script.

Roth excels as the dangerous ex who can appear innocuous to stranger. We know him mostly in villain-type roles. When he smiles wide, the fillings appear on his crooked teeth. The calm, kind voice he uses with Margaret makes it that much more disturbing. When she confronts him in a park, he pretends not to know her. “How did you know my name?” “You told it to me,” he lies (or does he?) The “is it real or not” element of the film is contrived and ultimately doesn’t work, and the earliest scenes – such as the ghastly wound on Abbie’s leg – tease at a thrilling film that ultimately doesn’t exist.