Resurrection Film Review — Rebecca Hall Excels In Horror About An Abusive Ex

One of the frequent injustices of awards season is that roles in genre films, especially horror films, rarely get the recognition they deserve. This is especially true when female actresses are trying to play the part. (Men playing monsters are often praised.)

In a fair world, Lupita Nyong'o would have won for Us (2019) , Essie Davis for The Babadook (2014) and Toni Collette for Legacies (2018). Now Rebecca Hall has joined the list, starring in the new film Rebirth . This is a performance that contains boundless emotions, her face, posture and voice are combined and expressed in the smallest movements of the performance. This is Shvom A. Frey's best portrayal of a woman since Rebecca Hall in The Night House (2020) or Christina (2016).

In Rebirth , she plays Margaret, a slick corporate executive from Albany, New York whose life is apparently divided by her skillful relationship with her partner Peter (Michael Esper). That doesn't stop her from being a loving single parent to her teenage daughter Abby (Grace Kaufman) and a mentor to other young women in the workplace, especially those who deal with bad boyfriends.

And then one day she met the worst man in the world many years ago. David (Tim Roth) seduced her when she was a teenager, slept with her when she became an adult, and lured her into humiliating and painful insults, which she calls, with terrible irony, what "good" has. This continued until he did something so unforgivable that he eventually left. In one of Hall's great monologues, Margaret reveals the entire backstory in all its insane detail to a young colleague who bursts into tears, wondering if this was some sort of corporate hazing. In fact, the recognition of the absurdity of the story of Margaret and David is also a test for the audience.

As she begins demanding new services, Margaret fears that history will repeat itself and that she will hurt Abby in some way. At the very least, the past would spoil the present, which Margaret could not allow.

Writer-director Andrew Semans hits a dead end with a climax that's stranger than David-Lynch, reminiscent of Alex Garland's thematically similar Men earlier this year. (Add this film's star, Jesse Buckley, to the list of actors who have played prominent and underrated horror roles.) But Hall, largely with the help of Roth, managed to sell the ending at the cost of theatricality and willpower. Something that stays in your memory day after day like a terrible nightmare and says something deep about the wounds left by abusive relationships.

★★★★☆

In theaters in the UK and online in the US from 16 December.