Editor's Note: This article is courtesy of guest reviewer M.C. Steffen, who kindly wrote up his thoughts from a Chicago-based press screening we weren't able to get to otherwise. Thank you to M.C. for his hard work!

“Sadists never understand why other people don’t enjoy their sadism as much as they do,” Margaret (Rebecca Hall) says in one of the first lines of indie writer-director Andrew Semans’s Resurrection. And while the context seems relatively low-stakes — Margaret is explaining why she wants her timorous intern Gwyn (Angela Wong Carbone) to dump her shitty boyfriend, after Gwyn remarks that he insists on making demeaning jokes at her expense — the word sadist feels ominous. Why is that pointed a word within Margaret’s reach at a moment’s notice? We’re barely a minute in, and the movie has told us that our protagonist has a history with sadistic men. A few minutes later, the title sequence reminds us that the movie is called Resurrection — and promises that this trauma is about to resurface.

But beyond setting up the story, the opening also seems to promise another “elevated” horror movie: a film that’s half genre exercise, half (if that) correct-but-overly-didactic message movie. Fortunately, Semans largely avoids this trap: every now and then a line lands too on the nose, but Resurrection is mostly content to make its points about the violence that men often inflict in relationships, and the failures of society to meaningfully protect women from that violence, by simply being a damn unnerving story about a woman grappling with one such impossible situation.

Mostly, that is, until the movie plunges headlong into another common elevated horror trap: a story that flies straight off the rails in the final act. Resurrection’s ending flat-out doesn’t work. But I can’t fully explain why without dropping some huge spoilers, and besides, there’s plenty of terrific filmmaking until we reach that point.

Resurrection is at its best in its first act, using razor-sharp cuts and a jumpy string score to put us on edge while it sets up its scenario. Through a set of taut vignettes, we learn that Margaret is an accomplished pharmaceuticals executive who has mastered her always-in-control, friendly-yet-guarded persona. Besides a no-strings affair with her coworker (Michael Esper), her only real relationship is with her daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman), who is about to leave for college. Margaret’s already feeling a bit on edge about this and dealing with it by doubling down on her tendency to be a little overprotective.

But Margaret is soon thrust into a situation completely out of her control when she begins to notice her abusive ex David (Tim Roth) skulking about places where she just so happens to be. Never initiating contact, always with enough of a veneer of plausible deniability — He’s a biologist, so maybe he was invited to the same biotech conference? Maybe he also needed something from the department store… in the women’s section? — that the police can’t/won’t do anything about it. But Margaret will go to seemingly any length to protect herself and more importantly her daughter, and while we won’t find out the backstory for a while, Hall’s incredible performance immediately makes it clear that this man’s mere presence is a terrifying threat.

Semans has said that he didn’t want Resurrection to exploit his protagonist’s terror, and while we can debate whether a “woman in peril” thriller is inherently exploitative, his film is very deliberately constructed to keep any hint of sadism from seeping into our point of view, locking us into Margaret’s thoughts and feelings at every moment. This happens most prominently during a few key moments in act one, when Margaret either sees David lurking in her orbit or experiences a flashback or panic attack at the fear that he might be. Each time, Margaret struggles to get herself (and, in the most intense of these scenes, her daughter) to safety while still putting across her “I’m completely in control” demeanor. But the mask clearly slips, more and more each time, and while we know that other people must be gawking at the scene she’s creating (“Mom, stop acting crazy!” Abbie shouts at one point), we never really see them. Because Margaret isn’t paying attention to them, the framing and focus stay squarely on Hall’s frightened, determined face.

The highly stylized cinematography and editing are terrific throughout. I’ve already mentioned how well Ron Dulin’s editing disorients us and pushes the story forward at a whiplash pace in the first act. But as David begins making his intentions clear and Resurrection starts to settle into a drawn-out game of cat and mouse, Dulin similarly slows down the pace, lingering in each dread-filled moment of suspense while keeping in reserve his startling cuts for the occasional jumpscare. Meanwhile, cinematographer Wyatt Garfield keeps finding new ways to film Hall surrounded by doorframes, by closets, by furniture: increasingly visually “boxed in.” Is it subtle? No, but it’s pulp — and it works. Semans knows he owes a debt to the long line of thrillers that invented these tools (at one point, when Margaret is tailing David in her car, Semans and Garfield openly quote Vertigo), but he uses those tools to unnerving effect.

More than anyone, though, Semans owes a debt to Rebecca Hall, whose performance is truly extraordinary, rising to every one of the script’s incredible challenges: she’s at the center of every scene; she has to perform both Margaret’s fear of what David could do to her and Abbie, while also performing the performance that she’s unafraid and in control to her colleagues, to Abbie, and to David; she has to capture the tension between dreading what David will do when the monster in him finally erupts, but also hoping that whatever it is he’ll just fucking do it already, because the wait is unbearable.

Hall is at her best in a breathtaking scene about midway through, when Margaret finally reveals to her intern the history of her and David’s relationship, in a devastating monologue filmed in a single close-up take. “I've never told anyone that in my life,” she says, immediately after flawlessly recounting every beat of her story, and Hall’s delivery contains both the self-possession of a survivor who has memorized her trauma so that she can never be gaslit into doubting it ever again, and the hesitancy of a victim who must force herself to do the vulnerable work of opening up to another person. It’s a masterful performance — and the film’s entire raison d’être; if Resurrection is elevated horror, it’s elevated because Semans and Hall take the scenario so seriously.

That self-seriousness gradually turns from an asset to a drawback as the film shifts from act two to its endgame: as David begins to exert more control over Margaret’s life, and as she begins to completely unravel. It’s not “bad” until the last scene, and in many respects it remains great. The more David emerges as an active threat, the more that Roth gets to shine as a wicked manipulator who, most horribly of all, never for an instant betrays that he doesn’t fully believe his lies. Meanwhile, as Margaret clamps down on Abbie in a misguided attempt to protect her, the film becomes an interesting study in the ways survivors of abuse may go on to perpetuate similar abuses.

But as Resurrection unspools these narrative threads and the scenario grows increasingly unhinged, Semans’ script has a harder time convincing us of what’s happening in Margaret’s head and what’s driving her to make the decisions she does. Hall does a valiant job filling in these gaps, clearly creating her character’s internal logic in these moments to carry the movie through them. But the little inconsistencies and choices that strain credulity start to pile up, and while it would be easy to handwave those away if the movie were pure pulp, the rich psychological realism (or, at least, realism-adjacent) of the first half makes these flaws in the second stand out.

And this all culminates in a complete misfire of a climax: a sudden lurch into a completely different genre that, near as I can tell, may or may not “actually” happen in-universe, but either way doesn’t work. If we’re meant to take it literally, then it completely shatters the story’s rules without anywhere near enough preparation; on the other hand, if we’re meant to assume that it all takes place in Margaret’s broken mind, then it escalates her mental deterioration way too quickly. Particularly when the movie’s greatest strength has been the way that Hall systematically unpacks every complex step in that deterioration until this point.

I have to be honest: Resurrection’s ending left such a bad taste in my mouth that I’m not eager to revisit it. But I also have to be honest that I wish I hadn’t mentioned that, because the first hour of this movie really is a terrific horror-thriller: a wonderfully unsettling exercise in exploring how it feels to writhe in the grip of an ever-approaching, insidious threat. And Hall’s performance is astounding — all on its own, it’s such an achievement that I may end up giving Resurrection a rewatch a lot sooner than I’d intended.

M.C. Steffen is a writer, storyteller, and teacher based in Chicago. He loves writing and thinking about stories that challenge the ways in which we think about stories. As a movie buff, he enjoys obscurant arthouse films and surreally terrible B-movies in equal measure. You can see him performing autobiographical monologues on Chicago stages, and writing overly theoretical movie reviews on Letterboxd.