What makes Margaret run? In the darkly arresting, committedly preposterous psychothriller “Resurrection,” she races up and down city streets, her limbs pumping like pistons, a furious spring in her every accelerated step. It’s her morning exercise regimen, but her demonic pace and half-panicked, half-determined expression suggest something else; Margaret, played by the ever-brilliant Rebecca Hall, doesn’t seem to be running toward so much as away from something. That becomes literally the case one day at work, when something alarming catches her eye and sends her fleeing and flailing, desperate to keep outrunning a past that seems to have finally caught up with her.
The writer and director Andrew Semans (“Nancy, Please”) keeps his heroine locked in his camera’s sights, even when she doesn’t make that easy. When we first meet her, Margaret seems coolly in control of herself and her surroundings, from her swanky high-rise apartment to the glassy executive suite where she works. That control expresses itself in ways that you could almost dismiss as standard-issue “tightly wound”: in the physically intense but emotionless sex she has with a married co-worker (Michael Esper); in the sternly supportive advice she gives an intern (Angela Wong Carbone) who’s in a bad relationship; and above all in the close watch she keeps on her own college-bound daughter, Abbie (a terrific Grace Kaufman).
Margaret and Abbie’s well-observed bond — full of mutual affection, even as the latter increasingly chafes under the former’s tight reins — is one of the best things about “Resurrection.” When strange things start to happen to Abbie — a weird discovery, a biking accident — we naturally share Margaret’s parental concern. But Abbie, in turn, supplies us with a logical point of view on Margaret, regarding her mother first with mild exasperation and then with rapidly mounting alarm. And what finally gives this movie its sustained tension is the degree to which it persuades us to abandon logic altogether, to situate ourselves on Margaret’s wavelength even as her words and actions defy comprehension. When the camera tracks her down an office corridor or across a park courtyard, it almost seems to be pulling her — or is it being pulled by her? — into the depths of a menacing new world.
