Resurrection Ending Explained: A Shocking Finale For The Rebecca Hall Horror Movie
With the 2022 thriller "Resurrection," director Andrew Semans crafted an elegant and disturbing portrait of psychological abuse by thrusting viewers directly into the headspace of the lead character. To watch the movie is to feel the tightly enclosed traps closing in on its protagonist, and by extension, the viewer. For a horror-adjacent movie with a title like "Resurrection," you might think it's about something coming back from the dead. And in a way, it is — a ghost from the past, back to haunt the coldly professional Margaret (Rebecca Hall, whose casting ensured the movie could get made).
But biologist David (Tim Roth) is very much alive, very real, and very threatening. And Margaret's daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman) is almost 18, the same age Margaret was when the 20-years-older David charmed her and her parents, got her to move into his home, and quickly began destroying her sense of self. Now he is back in her life, orbiting her and pushing her back into his manipulative mental chokehold.
If "Resurrection" were the most generic possible version of a stalker thriller, it would leave David and Margaret's evolving relationship at that, with him as the cat and her as the mouse. Instead, it lets you get to know Margaret's behavior in a vacuum, slowly weaving in her backstory with David until it all comes spewed out in one wildly messed-up and inappropriate monologue.
Even now, some decades later, Margaret blames herself for David's abuse. At the center of his manipulation, and the movie's climax, is their long-deceased baby, Benjamin. Which David ate.
Tight control
From the beginning of the movie, Margaret is controlled to the hilt, something cinematographer Wyatt Garfield emphasizes in odd, shallow-focus medium wide shots. The compositions make a point of trapping her in the clinical, sterile environments that she has made her home. We understand that she doesn't relax, ever, and the quick cuts of Ron Dulin's editing hammer the point home. Whether she's hanging out with her daughter (whose freedom she strictly controls) or having sex with her married coworker Peter (Michael Esper), good things happen, and then they end before they even register.
Abbie resents Margaret's tight hold over her life, which only grows more intense when she ends up in a bicycling accident (which we learn later was David's doing). As Abbie rolls her eyes, Margaret talks to her like she's Liam Neeson in "Taken," bringing up how she will kill anybody who lays a finger on her.
While David's arrival on the scene tears Margaret up, it also reveals why she has built her life up behind so many walls. Margaret can comfort a coworker in an abusive relationship because she gets it. But few abusive relationships go as far as Margaret and David's.
There is a world around Margaret, but its purpose is to clarify her paranoia and to place her crumbling sense of self in context. For as much as it matters, the movie feels like a two-hander between her and David, exploring the consequences of their abusive relationship two decades later. We see no glimpse of their romantic relationship, but we understand it intimately. The brutal, visceral pain of the past is left in memories.
They went there
After Margaret confronts David, he is effectively invited back into her life. He talks about Benjamin, the baby they shared, and whom he ate one fateful day after sending her to the market, leaving just a couple of fingers on the table. As he tells her, "he's in my belly now."
While Margaret knows the truth intellectually, she can't bring herself to admit that Benjamin is actually dead, something that David takes advantage of to manipulate her further. When she talks with him, he lets her know that Ben is happy to see her. At one point, he tells her to feel his belly, as if he's pregnant.
Tim Roth's creepy and brilliant performance is key to the movie, giving it a feeling of heightened gaslighting similar to 2020's "The Invisible Man." As Margaret breaks down, ruining her relationships with Abbie and Peter, David is practically the only person she can turn to, even though she knows what to expect: the most brutal kinds of manipulation with a warm smile that's missing a tooth — he snuck it in Abbie's wallet early in the movie. She performs the "kindnesses" he requests of her, whether holding a yoga pose all night or walking to work barefoot, all in exchange for him keeping baby Ben alive.
As Tim Roth told /Film, the movie's big gambit is to get "the audience going, like, 'Oh, you're not going to go there. Oh no, they're not going there. Oh my God, they went there.'" Whether or not David actually has Benjamin alive inside him, there is a part of the viewer that's asking themselves the same thing. And by the movie's ending, we have a seeming answer.
A happy ending
Margaret goes into David's hotel room, and after vocally buying into his claims about Ben being in his belly, she tells David that he must be suffering in there. From there, the climax of the movie involves her and David having a knock-down, drag-out knife fight in the room, one that Margaret eventually wins out of sheer grit. For however much David has been mentally ruining her, the scene is wildly violent, and cathartic too. More of David's gaslighting, and he dies.
Going up to David's body on the floor, Margaret cuts open his belly, digs up his intestines, and indeed, there is a baby in there. Little Benjamin, whom she holds tight in her blood-soaked hands. And then, we move to the future, where Abbie happily spots her mother and newly-rescued brother. She holds him and lets her mom know she's not scared of her anymore. A happy ending.
But almost certainly an unreal ending. The ending does everything it can to give you the impression of a dream. It gives us the first close-up of Abbie, and everything in Margaret's apartment is softly lit, with the warm glow of happiness. Rebecca Hall's deeply-felt, intense performance finally winds down into nothing but a sleepy smile. Somehow, Abbie has no questions about the existence of Benjamin. Somehow, everything has been resolved with a bow, and Abbie notes to her mom that she's no longer afraid. But Margaret's face changes as the camera pushes in on her, culminating in a gasp, as if panic has fully set in, the crash of reality.
Semans's perspective
Speaking with /Film, writer and director Andrew Semans was coy about the movie's finale. "Whether it's truthful or not, whether it's fantasy or reality, I had to see what the perfect ending was for this character." This particular conclusion, with Margaret tearing up David's insides and finding a living baby beneath it all, is the perfect ending for the character. According to Semans, the ending was there from the early stages of the script to the end, an operatic and bloody conclusion to the tightly controlled first 90 minutes.
While Semans refuses to give a straight answer, either in the movie or in interviews, about whether or not Margaret's conclusion is "the truth," it's hard not to notice the strings of the illusion. As a viewer, you want Margaret to have succeeded, to have gained back both of her children. But even while watching, you wait for the final shoe to drop. It never does, and instead, we're left with Rebecca Hall's expressive face, which has been used so effectively throughout the movie (never more than in her monologue to Gwyn about her backstory with David), frozen in the moments before a scream. Cut to credits, with Meg Baird's cover of "Blackwaterside" providing an ironically gentle counterpoint to the moods summoned by the movie.
The ending as-is suggests a tragic ending that the movie doesn't portray. But as Semans said, "I didn't want to see that tragedy. I wanted to see her victory."