‘Resurrection’ Review: Rebecca Hall is One Mad Mother in an Earnest Yet Utterly Unhinged Psych-Thriller

variety.com:

Jessica Kiang There are very few actors with Rebecca Hall’s facility for making difficult, even contradictory characters seem plausible.

So it’s quite something to say that even her knack for the dignified and intelligent portrayal of mental and behavioral instability meets its Waterloo with Andrew Semans’ “Resurrection,” a psychological thriller that starts off promisingly before swerving into serious (and sadly self-serious) derangement.

It winds up several stops north of bonkers, in a finale that shoots for transgressive, psycho-biological role-reversal, but plays like 1994’s Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy “Junior” given a torture-porn makeover.Initially, Margaret (Hall) is an aspirational figure.

With a glass-walled office at her lucrative pharma job, a well-appointed apartment and intimate yet no-strings sex-on-demand with married co-worker Peter (Michael Esper), she is also a doting mom to 17-year-old Abbie (Grace Kaufman), who is about to head off to college. (On one level “Resurrection” can be read as the mother of all empty-nest breakdowns.) She’s so together, in fact, that we are introduced to her dispensing sensible, tough-love advice to callow intern Gwyn (Angela Wong Carbone), whose boyfriend belittles her, then sneers that she can’t take a joke when she complains. “Sadists never understand why other people don’t enjoy their sadism as much as they do,” says Margaret, firmly but kindly encouraging Gwyn to stand up for herself.