by Jason Adams
Wanna know how you're in the hands of a smart filmmaker? Well there are two signs, and funny enough they both involve Rebecca Hall. The first sign is thatthey hire Rebecca Hall. That's as smart as it gets! They do that much you know you're in good hands. The second sign is they give Rebecca Hall a five minute centerpiece monologue to deliver and they hold the camera on Rebecca Hall's face the entire time without cutting. That right there is what the movies were invented for, and that's how you know that Andrew Seman's film Resurrection, fresh outta Sundance, is worth its weight in Tim Roth's discarded teeth. What? Isn't that how you measure weight? I sure do now, anyway...
Resurrection stars Hall as Margaret, a no-nonsense business lady sharp in that very sharp way that Rebecca Hall and only Rebecca Hall can be... What Margaret's job is exactly I remain unsure of, but she wears perfectly tailored no doubt wildly expensive jackets and she sits in her office listening to a younger co-worker complain about her boyfriend a lot. At first I thought Margaret's job might be H.R. and this listening routine was part of her gig, but eventually it dawns on you that no, that's just Margaret's business-like approach to everything. Your co-worker doesn't like their dickhead boyfriend? Pound out some precise advice like gangbusters. You're having an affair with a married co-worker? Pound out some... well, yeah. Pound that out too.
Extraordinary competency is the order of the day basically, but because this is Rebecca Hall we're talking about there is, as there must be, an edge of slight unhinge, one just ever so fiercely yip-yip-yipping away in the background. Rebecca Hall's eyes, transparent as glass even as she tries to squint it away, let us know what's up. And so when weirdnesses start descending into Margaret's perfectly manicured world it's as if the spinning top, so gorgeous in its symmetrical form, gains a wee bit of wobble. These aren't small weirdnesses. Weird like a human tooth appearing in her teenage daughter's wallet. Weird shit! Ever competent Margaret tries handling them as they come but all it takes is a spying of one painfully familiar face, one that looks like, no, wait -- oh no it totally is Tim Roth -- and the top's no longer wobbling. The top has has spun out a window, plunging straight at the street.
And again here I refer you to director Andrew Seman's plain competency, because anybody who doesn't want to watch the hell out of a movie about Rebecca Hall losing her mind over Tim Roth is not anybody I wanna know. What a gift, and that's before you even get to that mid-film monologue that sweeps its arm ever so gracefully over Margaret's chess-board life and sends its pieces, us, everything, flying like gangbusters.
And this is another film where I feel the second-half surprises are too good to get into but let's just say that Roth, playing a man who may or may not be a figure from Margaret's past, causes some spillage. What I kept coming back to was William Friedkin's 2006 masterpiece of WTF-ery Bug, where two people hold hands together as they gently descend into a wild hell of their own making, taking us along as impotent side-car commuters strapped to our seats, eyelids glued open. If you were down for that I recommend you be down for Resurrection. And in turn Resurrection will go down on you like the good stuff, I promise.