Resurrection
Margaret Ballion pushes herself hard, the single and fiercely protective mother of a teenage girl, an executive in a biotechnology company developing gene therapies and chemotherapy regimes, running like a gazelle to stay fit and focused, even acting as a relationship counsellor, offering advice and encouragement to her intern.
But there another side to Margaret, having an illicit affair with a married co-worker and knocking back beer from the bottle when she is alone of an evening, the woman who is apparently enviably together and capable shattering entirely when at a conference she recognises a man in the audience whom she knew years before, triggering a panic attack and forcing her to flee to the safety of her apartment.
Its Scottish premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, writer/director Andrew Semans’ Resurrection stars The Night House’s Rebecca Hall as Margaret and Mr Right’s Tim Roth as David, seemingly the perfect English gentleman who initially apologises to Margaret and says she must have mistaken him for someone else but soon revealing himself to be the cruel and manipulative man she knew two decades previously.
Intent on exercising total control of Margaret, she is torn between accepting his little rituals of humiliation in order to protect Abbie in hopes he will keep to his promise of eventually leaving her alone, or finding a way to be rid of him forever, the only thing holding her back the hold he has over her, the secret that only the two of them know, a hope she cannot believe but clings to.
With The Last Ship‘s Grace Kaufman as Abbie, suffocated by her mother and unable to rationalise her behaviour, and Person of Interest‘s Michael Esper as Peter, wanting to understand and help but violently pushed away, Resurrection is a showcase for the leads which takes them to extremes, particularly the unravelling Hall who midway through delivers a single-take monologue chronicling her history of devotion, abuse and escape.
A difficult and unrelenting film, there is no forgiveness or redemption in Resurrection, David’s ruthless persistence setting the tone for what follows, a path which can only end in the destruction of one or the other though the final scene brings a twist of the knife strange and inexplicable, raising the question of whether either of them are truly sane by the end of it.
Edinburgh International Film Festival continues until Saturday 20th August
