So, here we are with Shudder again. This time, a good deal more mainstream than their last effort I came across, 'Good Madam'. Resurrection stars Rebecca Hall (Margaret) and Tim Roth (David). So naturally I am left wondering, what could possibly go wrong?
Margaret appears to have it all. Great job, smart daughter, a co-worker with, ahem, benefits. Life is pretty neat, even if she runs like a dalek would if you took its wheels off. I mean Phoebe Buffay had more grace, to be honest. When her nearly eighteen-year-old daughter goes to her friends house, like seemingly every other night judging by how much rampant rutting Margaret is doing of an evening, the daughter has an accident on a bicycle after one too many lemonade shandys and ends up in hospital. Margaret feels suitably guilty as it appears she was bouncing up and down on her co-worker at the exact time her daughter was trying to call her about her grisly leg-tearing incident.
During what seems to be a seminar, she spies David (Tim Roth) one column left and about five rows further forward, who at this point is still something of a mystery to the audience. He appears oblivious to her, however. It's enough to get her all a bit flustered for some as yet unknown reason, so she leaves the seminar and actually runs home. Obviously. That night, there is a knock on the door that she doesn't answer...
At about half an hour in and she sees him again, wandering seemingly innocently around a department store while she is clothes-shopping for her daughter. Again, she's out of there, pronto, dragging her bewildered daughter behind her. Who is this man? And why such fluster? C'mon film, you're a third over already!
It's about this point that things start to become what might or might not be a little clearer. Without going into detail, we begin to see the potential reason for her heightened awareness of the man apparently rendering her a gibbering idiot, unable to focus on anything else. This ambitious go-getter starts to overprotect her daughter, who will soon be leaving for college, and there is much hand-wringing and heightened navel-gazing. She's on red alert, but we still don't know why. Not for sure.
And to be fair, when the reveal does arrive, it is pretty fucked up and you can begin to understand her reaction to him, but maybe not for the reasons you might imagine at first.
Roth saunters through the entire film, only occasionally alarming to unencumbered eyes. It is Hall that keeps us on the edge of our seats, her gradual but unstoppable mental unravelling is an excellent, albeit extreme, representation of something all too unusual, but nonetheless real. Watchable throughout, it takes its time getting to the meat of the story and by the end, you almost feel like you've been through the whole unpleasantness yourself, so two firm thumbs up for that.
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