Think it over. You’re just messing with the idea, playing out a timeline where you step away. The feeling pries at you, preys on you: “is this something I can be with?” If Titane of last year was a neon-colored nightmare, contorting identity and love to its own ideas of hurt and hope, Sundance-premier Resurrection is sucking that saturation bone-dry. Down to the formless husk, to be ground further to its singular elements, fighting on the immediacies and fringes of pure horror.

Sadness, grief, regret, the film pushes that all down. There’s the outright, unimaginable core, sure. There are flickers, though, of otherness, goodness not scrubbed out just yet. Close relationships, love and laughter. The picturesque things you’d find framed in pictures at TJ Maxx. How could it be any other way, really? What is the past if only the lows and the highs we resurrect for ourselves?

Like most any film, there’s a plot here. It’s best not to dwell on it too much now and instead experience it once you’ve made the choice. There’s a woman named Margaret and her daughter, Abbie. Margaret’s life consists of her daughter, her workplace, which she knows and excels at, and something else that wants back in. Like some of the best movies, it’s character-driven to the point of breaking the world. However, it never breaks its players into something they aren’t (or what they couldn’t become).

Rebecca Hall is transcendental as Margaret, and Tim Roth is enigmatic as evil can come. Even saying this, to allude to their shared greatness — of just saying there are actors who act exceptionally well in this film — feels like a spoiler of sorts, and is almost a disservice to them. The supporting cast collectively is in top-tier form, too. Grace Kaufman as Abbie strikes a teenage balance of vulnerability, standoffishness, and overwhelmed maturity that isn’t often realized.

The cinematography and music are stitched together, intentionally yet breaking at the same time. Everything is beautifully, coldly shot and scored. The clean minimalism of a sterilized, top-end surgery room, along with the shots and score, make developments all the more discomforting.  It meets the viewer head-on, bombarding them with internalizations of protest. Even externalization via a note-taking app would just be punctuated by expletives, disbelief, and “make it stop”.

The best of horror excels when it colors inside the lines of everything that needn’t be so horrific. It’s the poignant, heartbreaking sentiments shared between a daughter and a mother on what love is and what it means in good-intentioned, but misinformed ways. It’s the overwhelmed spiral downward of seeing the walls we’ve created not so much come crashing down but disintegrate away as if they never really existed. It is being presented with horrific standards as if they were innocuous pastimes. It’s entirely where forces known and unknown can convene and unravel the most seemingly pedestrian, yet commendable, life.

There’s something about disquieting horror: when things of the night go bumping in the day, and nobody can really see them for what they truly are. Resurrection excels at capturing a lingering, almost-aloof dread that likely will go unparalleled the remainder of this year. It’s so much more, though, equally bringing strange, quiet sadness, that disturbs but always retains it core. If not only on the merit of being hard to watch, but of feeling like earned, non-gratuitous torture, really.

Excluding those who outright reject this movie out of boredom, there can’t be much that will be more loved or vehemently hated if it gets a wider release in 2022. In the crossroads of being hard to watch and needing to be seen, Resurrection has found its place. When a film makes choices that you know you didn’t want to be made, but you can’t shake that they needed to be done, well, that’s a miracle of a resurrection-type caliber.

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Resurrection

9

Score

9.0/10

Pros

• Horrific
• Career-best performances from everyone involved
• Filmed, written and scored fantastically
• Can still be seen online via Sundance as of publishing