“Resurrection” will keep you waiting till the very end to take you on a journey you never expected. Rebecca Hall is brilliant in her portrayal of a mother with a traumatic past. Tim Roth’s smile as the psychotic lover will send a chill down your spine. The film starts with Margaret closely listening to a young girl’s relationship with her boyfriend, who tends to be insensitive, but Margaret goes ahead and calls him a sadist. Initially, I thought that Margaret might be a corporate counselor, but as the story progresses, we get to know that she holds an eminent position at the biotech company. The woman she was listening to was an intern named Gwen, and she took it upon herself to positively impact her life. Margaret is mostly seen in blacks, grays, and whites, nothing that will draw any attention to her. The only color in her routine lifestyle is Abbie, her seventeen-year-old daughter.
Spoilers Ahead
‘Resurrection’ Plot Summary: What Is The Film About?
Nothing in Margaret’s life is out of place. She is the perfect employee. She shares the bed with her married colleague whenever she desires, and she has a nearly perfect apartment that she shares with her daughter. Unlike Margaret’s end of the apartment, Abbie’s room is a mess, indicating how there are spaces and people she cannot control. Her daughter will be going away to college, and after two weeks, she will turn eighteen. Margaret was coping with the idea of her daughter no longer being with her all the time. One evening, Abbie showed her mother a tooth she found in her purse. It wasn’t hers, and she did not know to whom it belonged. It just appeared. Even though it was strange, Margaret did not give much thought to it, but it was the beginning of the arrival of a past she had left buried.
Margaret panicked when she was informed that her daughter had fallen off a bicycle she was riding with her friend. We further learn how overprotective Margaret was of her daughter by not allowing her to learn to ride a bike. While she believed she was protecting Abbie, her daughter often felt trapped. Her overprotectiveness turned into maddening despair once she noticed David Moore at an annual conference. Everything around her was a blur, and her heart started to pound rapidly. She ran out of the conference hall to her house to check on her daughter. Abbie was surprised by her mother’s sudden arrival and knew something was wrong with her, but Margaret refused to tell her the truth and blamed it on her health. She stopped Abbie from leaving the house; she alarmed her about a danger looming around her from which she must be protected. Her nightmare about a baby left inside an oven was a clue for the audience to solve her mysterious past. Did she murder her baby in the past? Was the man her ex-partner with whom she had a child? What was she running away from?
Who Was David Moore?
Margaret started to notice David in every other public place she was present, and she finally got the courage to confront him. She went straight to him at the park, directly threatening him to stay away from her and her daughter. The man in question initially pretended to not know her, though later, he left phrases for her to solve. He mentioned that Ben was with him. This remark startled Margaret, but she retorted back by accusing him of being a liar. He left the park, but he smiled broadly enough for her to realize that the tooth Abbie found was his. He was keeping his eyes on her daughter, and she didn’t even know about it. Margaret approached the police for help, but she had nothing to charge him for. She always saw him in public spaces, and he did not threaten her directly yet. Margaret left, knowing that she was on her own to take care of her daughter. She added an extra lock in her apartment, and she took out a revolver she had kept hidden in her locker.
We get to know about David Moore from Margaret when she poured her heart out to Gwen. In the seven-and-a-half-minute monologue, Margaret spoke about her past for the first time. The long take with restricted camera movement, focusing only on Hall’s expression as she narrated her horrific past, was hard-hitting. Her parents were biologists, and she accompanied them to a conference in Canada. She met Moore there. She was eighteen at the time. Moore was an attractive man, and in the boring landscape, she found him to be captivating. He managed to charm her parents and became a regular at their house. Margaret eventually moved out of her parent’s house, stating that she was too old to be living with them. She started to live with Moore, and gradually the acts of torture started. He used to call them little acts of kindness. It started with cooking, cleaning, and asking her to never wear shoes, and she obliged. He would shower her with praise and affection after the acts. She felt seen and appreciated in his presence. He told her she was his muse, and she inspired him to make a major breakthrough. She was naïve enough to believe him, but gradually the acts of kindness got worse. He would ask her to burn herself with cigarettes if she was unable to perform a task, and she did that. She realized that she was pregnant after five months of carrying the unborn. David forbade her from giving birth, and she did all that she could to stop the baby from growing, but she could not help it. She gave birth to him on her bed without any drugs or help. She immediately fell in love with her son, Benjamin. David knew how much the baby meant to her, and one day he asked her to go to town to get some supplies. When she returned home, all that was left of Benjamin were two fingers. No matter how many times Margaret asked him what he did to her boy, he replied, saying that he had consumed him. That the baby was living in him and, with time, Margaret started to believe it. She could hear the baby cry; she could feel that he was trapped. But she couldn’t take it anymore, so she ran away with some money in a truck to America. She believed that she had left him behind, but after 22 years, he was back in her life to traumatize her to insanity. Gwen did not know what to say. She awkwardly left, either choosing to not believe what she had just heard or simply forgetting about it.
What is interesting is how it was David who had forbidden Margaret from drawing, and after twenty-two years, just a day or two before her daughter handed her the tooth, she drew for the first time in a long while. It seemed as if she subconsciously knew about Moore’s arrival, and she wanted to do what she enjoyed doing before he came into her life once again. It could also be her way of exercising her free will before she lost control of her life. She drew triangles the first time he met her, and she was drawing the same before he arrived again.
‘Resurrection’ Ending Explained: Is David Moore Dead Or Alive? What Does The Closing Shot Mean?
Margaret tried to decode Moore’s message, and she realized that he mentioned the word “Boulevard.” She found a hotel by the same name and waited in her car for him. She noticed him leaving the hotel and going to a restaurant. She approached him there. She warned him to stay away from her life, but he agreed to do so only if she performed an act of kindness. He asked her to walk to her office barefooted every day, and only then would he leave them alone. She refused to take orders from him anymore. He once again spoke about Benjamin. He mentioned how her boy was alive, and he had kept him alive, but if he chose to kill him, she could not blame him for it. Margaret left the diner determined not to accept his order, but she prioritized her daughter’s life and chose to walk barefoot to confirm her safety. Abbie believed that her mother was suffering mentally and that she needed help. She could no longer stay confined in her room, away from a danger she had never seen or heard of. Margaret started to stalk him at night and went into his room when he was away. She found the cloth she used to wrap her baby in. She took it with her to her apartment and slept holding on to it. She woke up realizing that she had lactated, her life was chaotic, and she could no longer reason any occurrence. The lactation could be an indication of the deprived mother, who wanted to nurture her baby, a joy that was taken away from her, but the thought of holding her baby again made her body react. Margaret watched Moore every night, contemplating murdering him with her gun. When Abbie warned her that she would leave if her mother continued to keep her locked in the house, Margaret decided it was her time to kill the man.
She held the gun to his head, but she could not shoot him. He got hold of her and reasoned that she could not shoot because she knew that the baby lived in him. He punished her by ordering her to hold a stress position every day from 2 a.m. to dawn. Margaret performed according to his demand, but Abbie ran away from the house, and she could not stop her. She was determined to be the perfect mother to her children this time and decided to meet Moore when he invited her to his room at night. She left a note and a video message for Abbie in case she failed to survive.
Moore welcomed her in peace. He had set a romantic dinner in his room. They discussed their past, the first time they met. He went ahead and asked her to listen to her baby. She placed her ears on his stomach. She could hear the baby. She could feel him inside. She begged her son to forgive her for leaving him. Moore comforted her, saying that the baby forgave her. Margaret was certain now that her baby was alive, and she needed to rescue him. She grabbed the knife she had kept hidden under her sleeves and attacked Moore. She injured him enough to be able to tie him with cable wires to the bed. Moore warned her that the baby would only be alive if he was alive, so she decided to rip open his body while he was conscious. Moore died in the process, but after pulling out his organs, she found her baby hidden underneath. She was able to rescue him, finally, after all these years.
“Resurrection” ends with Abbie coming back home to visit her mother. The rooms are oddly bright, giving us a sense of it being a fragment of imagination. She enters her mother’s room; we witness Margaret holding Ben in her arms. Abbie carefully holds her baby brother; she enjoys his company. She expresses her gratitude to her mother, for saving her from the luring danger. She was no longer afraid now, and that was only because of Margaret. She smiled hearing her daughter; she was able to protect her children and become the perfect mother that she had always envisioned to be. As the camera goes close to her face, a piece of ominous music starts to play, indicating how reality might be far from it. Of course, the ending is open-ended, leaving it to the imagination of the audience. What can be confirmed is that what we witnessed, in the end, was far from reality. It was a hallucination or nightmare, or even supernatural. The rescue was what Margaret had always wanted to perform, but she failed to do it in the past, which was why she believed that she saved Ben in the end. She had caught the madness that David possessed; she saw what he wanted her to see. He believed that without him, there would no longer be a baby, but Margaret had absorbed the madness well enough to project it into her version of reality. From her teen years through the various endurance tests, David made her believe that she was a warrior, someone who bears pain like no one else. It was this belief that perhaps made Margaret go through this horrific journey alone, knowing that only she could protect and solve it all. Eventually, losing herself, and her daughter in the process. She could have either murdered Moore, or she could have imagined it all; either way, the reality was worth gasping at.
“Resurrection” is a 2022 Drama Thriller film directed by Andrew Semans.
