Resurrection Review: Rebecca Hall Leads a Deeply Twisted Psychodrama

Fiendishly splitting the difference between the kind of low-rent parental vigilante movies that will always live on basic cable, and the kind of high-brow polymorphic freakouts that all but died with Andrzej Żuławski, Andrew Semans’ aptly named “Resurrection” may never quite reach “Possession” levels of psychic collapse (what does?), but it sure gets a hell of a lot closer than the broad familiarity of its setup might lead you to expect. In fact, the first act of this impressively deranged Sundance premiere almost seems to lure you into a false sense of security on purpose.

There have been any number of basic psychological thrillers about strong women who get dismissed as “hysterical” and/or gaslit into self-doubt when they report an urgent threat of some kind, and “Resurrection” is happy to disguise itself as the latest thing off the assembly line. Even when Semans’ original script is punctured by occasional stabs of sickening horror — its control-obsessed heroine so unmoored by the sudden reappearance of a strange man from her past that she sees a baby-shaped chicken carcass screaming in the oven of her Albany condo — the film’s basic plot and deceptively bland aesthetic still make it feel like the kind of thing that Ashley Judd or Halle Berry might have made a couple of decades ago.

Then again, some of the other red flags that bleed into view during those first 20 minutes make it harder for us to lower our guard. The most obvious of them all is the fact that Margaret is played by Rebecca Hall, a severe talent whose affinity for acting in genuinely twisted shit (“Christine,” “The Night House,” “A Rainy Day in New York”) was on full display in the years leading up to her far more austere and prestigious directorial debut (“Passing”). If Hall’s presence doesn’t have you on high alert, the idea that Tim Roth agreed to play Margaret’s stalker definitely should. The British vet has taken the occasional paycheck gig over the course of his long career, but his signature blend of primitive-brilliant menace has been in such great demand that it would be out of character for him to play some off-the-rack Bad Man in an indie thriller made by someone with just a few credits to their name. Great actors simply don’t spend their summer in Albany without a good reason, but it only takes Roth a single reaction shot in his first proper scene — a split-second flash of a sadistic grin — to know for certain that “Resurrection” gave him a great one.

If the details of Margaret and David’s shared past are best left unspoiled, that’s not because you wouldn’t believe how fucked up they are, but rather because you would. While “Resurrection” eventually offers its fair share of amateur surgery, the movie first gets under the skin because its jaw-dropping backstory is just plausible enough to belong to you or someone you love or even the badass single mom who works in your office,…