In the Flesh: Resurrection

Losing a baby ends your life. I can still remember the feeling when I heard my sister’s son had passed shortly after birth. It was like a building coming down around me, a thunderous rain of masonry and choking dust swallowing up all other thoughts and experiences until all you can hear is the distant rumble of your ongoing burial and all you can feel is the reverberations of each impact slowly reducing you to a bag of jellied flesh and pulverized bone. We first meet Margaret (Rebecca Hall) living deep inside this waking death, her successful life at a pharmaceutical research corporation and her at first healthy relationship with teenage daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman) a bandage over the much deeper, and deeply repressed, loss of her first child, Benjamin. When David Moore (Tim Roth), the much older man who groomed and abused Margaret as a teenager, suddenly reappears, the lips of that wound unseal and the initial state of psychic death reasserts itself. The building, suspended in the midst of collapse for eighteen years, begins to crumble again.

David, however, brings with him not just the agony of Margaret’s past loss but the frightening promise of renewal and restoration. He had, he claims, kept their son alive and in suspended infancy inside his belly ever since devouring him, and if Margaret will only do him what he calls “kindnesses”, petty power games of humiliation and abjection, he promises to restore Benjamin to her. For victims of abuse there is an immediate and terrifying resonance to David’s apparently deranged raving, a return to the distorted belief that one’s abuser is the focal point of the universe and that all one’s struggles and hardships revolve around their happiness or else some form of endless protracted “closure”. Without the physical and emotional presence of the abuser, life cannot advance. Hall’s gaunt, skull-like beauty suits the haunted role of Margaret perfectly, and director Andrew Semans frequently bathes her in light and shadow to emphasize the striking planes and hollows of her features.

In one stunning long shot, Margaret reveals the horror of her youthful experiences to a well-intentioned intern (Angela Wong Carbone) as the light from her computer monitor waxes and wanes, limning her cheekbone in pearlescent radiance and lighting the tear that wends its way down her face from within. Semans’ subtle visual mastery transforms the movie’s palette of grays, browns, blacks, and tans into a simultaneously sickly and stifling labyrinth. Hall is frequently soaked in sweat or kissed with a light sunburn, whether real or simulated by makeup, emphasizing her mental decay and nearly allergic reaction to the resurfacing of her trauma. The film’s final crisis image digs both bloody hands deep into the gendered mechanics of abuse, moving beyond reality into the domain of the super-real, the manifestation of Freudian breakthroughs in the phenomenal world. The building refashions itself. Hannibal's teacup is whole again, at least in some contorted sense. Semans’ film is complex and elusive, never stooping to preach or explain. It sits comfortably among the year’s best and most challenging films.