Resurrection turns Rebecca Hall loose on a story Andrew Semans never lets us verify

Margaret lives the kind of life a thriller usually punishes: a clean office, a teenage daughter she manages in measured doses, a morning run she takes alone. The opening sequences are quiet enough that nothing reads as horror — until she sees a man at an industry conference and her composure breaks in real time. From that moment Resurrection is about whether she is right about what she has just seen.

Andrew Semans wrote and directed the film, which premiered at Sundance in January 2022 before a small theatrical run and a Shudder release in the United States. Rebecca Hall plays Margaret. Tim Roth plays David, the man from her past. Grace Kaufman, Michael Esper and Angela Wong Carbone fill out a deliberately narrow cast.

What the film attempts, and mostly manages, is to keep the audience inside the protagonist’s account of things. The screenplay does not break away to confirm or deny Margaret’s version of her history. There are no flashbacks that take the frame, no outside characters who arrive carrying the truth. We sit inside her head, and the question of whether her head is reliable is the engine.

The camera stays close on Hall’s face long enough to be uncomfortable, and the score works more on patience than on jolts. There is a long, near-uninterrupted monologue late in the film; Hall plays it without cuts and without raising her voice, and it is the moment the film either earns or loses you. The choice to let her speak that long is the bet Semans places on his lead.

Tim Roth’s David is calibrated to do almost nothing. He smiles, he asks for small favors, he never raises a hand. The film’s discomfort is built on the gap between his behavior on screen and Margaret’s certainty about what he is — and on the fact that the screenplay never closes that gap.

Resurrection does not resolve the question it opens. It does not punish its protagonist for her suspicions and it does not absolve her either. What it leaves behind is the shape of a story we never get to verify from outside — which, depending on the kind of viewer you are, will read as a flaw or as the point.

Tags: psychological thriller, Rebecca Hall, Tim Roth, Andrew Semans, Angela Wong Carbone, Grace Kaufman