Resurrection is a 2022 film. It premiered at Sundance before being picked up by IFC Midnight, who released the movie in August 2022.
Margaret (Rebecca Hall) is a traumatized scientist with a perfectly ordered life. She has one daughter, Abbie (Grace Kaufman).
Then her ex-boyfriend, David (Tim Roth), comes back into her life, revealing the horrors of Margaret's past.
Tropes
- Affectionate Nickname: Margaret calls Abbie "Smidge".
- Bratty Teenage Daughter: Abbie is a realistic variation, quick with complaints and seldom telling Margaret where she's going or what she's doing, which incites Margaret's protective side. However, she only seems to have one friend who she hangs out to play video games with, making Margaret's reactions seem overblown. As the film goes on and Margaret becomes more and more unhinged, she becomes sincerely worried about her mother's mental health until she's forced to flee for her own safety.
- Eats Babies: David apparently ate his and Margaret's own baby son.
- Familial Cannibalism Surprise: Deconstructed. David apparently ate his and Margaret's son Ben, and did so specifically so he could continue to torment her.
- Gainax Ending: Margaret disembowels David and really does find Ben inside of him and takes him home, leading to a brightly-lit and upbeat epilogue of Abbie accepting the baby as her brother, thanking Margaret for her behavior, and preparing to leave for college, which can be interpreted as an hallucination from Margaret while she's dying or in jail. A more generous reading could be that even after all those triumphs she's still deeply traumatized by the events.
- Glorified Sperm Donor: After the horrors of her marriage to David and her son Ben's death, Margaret mentions that Abbie's father is "nobody" and she went out and got pregnant by a random stranger so that she wouldn't have to share her other child.
- Left Hanging: How David slipped his tooth into Abbie's wallet (if that really is what happened, or if Margaret is simply hallucinating and connecting David to an unrelated event) is never explained.
- Mama Bear: Deconstructed. Margaret is an extreme Knight Templar Parent to both her children, even though her son was presumably murdered around twenty years ago at least. When Margaret makes a declaration of protection to Abbie, the latter points out that the speech, and the feelings behind it, do nothing except intimidate her a little bit, and are just to make Margaret feel better about herself.
- May–December Romance: Deconstructed. Margaret met David when she was a teenager after he had noticed her by merit of her being the only young woman in the area, and he had seduced her after manipulating her gullible parents. They moved in together almost immediately, and David forced her to give up on her hobbies and interests in order to fulfill his desires, which she went along with willingly because she was young and easily led.
- Non-Action Big Bad: David is actually hardly ever violent towards Margaret. He prefers emotionally torturing her into performing what he calls "kindnesses" (extreme acts of emotional or physical self-harm) via psychological abuse. The only act of physical violence he commits is off-screen and even then it's ambiguous what he actually did. Even at the end, he puts up very little fight to Margaret's attempt to disembowel him, only trying to talk her out of it verbally.
- Open Secret: Margaret is shocked when she finds Peter in her home with Abbie, and demands to know why Abbie would let a "stranger" in. Abbie, who called Peter asking him to help with Margaret, scoffs at the idea she didn't know about their affair.
- Police Are Useless: From Margaret's point of view, as she goes to report David to the police after she encounters him in the park. The officer points out that there is nothing legally that they can do, as she had only encountered David by chance in public places and he had made no move to contact her in the twenty years they'd been apart.
- Real After All: There's quite a lot of Foreshadowing which suggests that Margaret is merely hallucinating David's presence back in her life. When they talk, they are frequently alone together, nobody else really seems to acknowledge his existence, and he never behaves violently towards her in a way that would confirm he's actually there. It's a twist that, no, he's really there, and the presence that Margaret is actually (probably) hallucinating is much scarier, but sadder.
- Sanity Slippage: The cool, competent Margaret loses her mind immediately after seeing David, clumsily abandoning the presentation she's viewing to sprint home to Abbie. She then begins to perform badly at work and terrifies Abbie with bizarre behavior.
- Sleeping with the Boss: Margaret is having an affair with her (married) employee. She views it as a no-strings-attached relationship, but he's in love with her — and she does not react well.
- Surprise Pregnancy: Margaret notes during her monologue to Gwyn that David had been opposed to children, and due to the stress of the relationship, she hadn't even noticed she was pregnant until five months in.
- Through the Eyes of Madness: The most likely interpretation of Margaret hearing a baby's cries when she listens to David's stomach and of seeing herself reunited with Ben.
