Resurrection

A woman's carefully constructed life gets up-ended when an unwelcome shadow from her past returns, forcing her to confront the monster she's evaded for two decades.

My wife, as we pause the movie momentarily to clean up our dinner dishes: “I feel like she’s being way too nonchalant about someone’s tooth just showing up in her wallet.”

A somewhat non-traditional Halloween choice, Resurrection is a harrowing and enigmatic tale of abuse, trauma, and sudden spiral of a mental breakdown, as a woman's tightly controlled life unravels wildly. The trick of the film being that the story is all told from the point of view of an unreliable narrator, and it’s capped with an ending that leaves the question of the film's entire reality up to its audience…

Did any of it really happen as shown?

Was she Fight Club-ing the whole thing?

Or, if only some of it happened as show, which parts?

(shrugs)

The thing is, while those are definitely valid questions, one that most people will no doubt be left with as the credits start, it's not really the point of the film. This is a film about a mental health crisis, about the world suddenly shifting under a person’s feet in a fundamental and catastrophic way, a change that they are not only incapable of dealing with, but of fully explaining, and when they try, the people they reach out to are often either unwilling or unable to help, leading to tragic results, and the events of this film are meant to represent that whole downward slope of tragic uncertainty.

So, your mileage may vary…

Some people might find this film to be a frustrating experience. That’s fair. It's definitely not an easy film to digest. It is off-kilter and jagged, it is tense and scary, and it purposely obscures whether or not any of this is actually happening as shown.

But frustrating or not, Rebecca Hall is fantastic as a women who finds herself very suddenly falling to pieces, and Tim Roth is perfect as the smarmy devil, a man or a ghost who may or may not be nipping at her heels.

In the end, Resurrection is a very intense film, one that will definitely put you on the edge of your seat.

Big thumbs up.