Resurrection (Andrew Semans, 2022).
I have now loved Suicide, the 1977 self-titled album by the brilliant, sleazy, frightening New York punk band, for longer than I haven’t, having discovered it somewhere around the age of fifteen. (I am now thirty-[redacted], an age at which it suddenly becomes worryingly easy to have been doing things for longer than you haven’t.) Still, I did not realize until last year that I had completely misinterpreted one of the lyrics of its sole single, “Cheree,” a tinkling S&M-tinged ballad. Until then, I had heard the couplet “I love you/Come play with me” as “I love you/Comply with me,” and in doing so had found the song no less romantic. Which was better, as a lyric about love? I had to confess to being disappointed with the truth, even as I recognized that “comply with me,” even in a song about a “black leather lady,” might be just a shade too dark. What is devotion, after all, but a willingness to bend to someone else’s desires, someone else’s will?
Right around the same time as I had this realization, I watched the film Resurrection (2022), an unsettling and bonkers horror movie starring the lithe, Modigliani-elegant actress Rebecca Hall. Her character Margaret is a high-functioning businesswoman, a devoted single mother, and the kind of person who exudes the air of an apex predator and a shivering prey animal simultaneously: ruthless, highly-strung, alert; a scheduler of sex and a habitual runner; a misandrist who employs her mistrustfulness and intelligence as twin shields in order to hide her vulnerability and terror. In the first scene, she is pictured having a serious conversation with her female intern (Angela Wong Carbone) about the much younger woman’s boyfriend, and the screenplay and performances are so perfectly pitched that we can instantly infer two things: that Margaret, being older and more experienced, is correctly identifying a streak of quiet and manipulative nastiness in the boyfriend’s behavior, and that something in her history is making her reaction to that nastiness outsized. “A sadist never understands,” Margaret says, plainly and a little too forcefully for a conversation in the workplace, “why others aren’t enjoying his sadism as much as he is.”
Margaret’s deep knowledge of sadism, it turns out, stems from a relationship she had as a teenager with an older man who lured her in with his intellect and apparent sensitivity, and then systematically dismantled her psyche. In a stunning monologue that somehow balances its lunacy with a terrible, realistic air of dread and violence, she reveals that this man, David (Tim Roth), began asking her for “kindnesses”—favors, sort of, or small tasks, like a spell of meditation or a yoga pose—early on in their relationship, showering her with praise when she obeyed him. (I love you, David says to her repeatedly, in deed if not in word, comply with me.) “But the kindnesses, they evolved, became tests, endurance tests—fasting for days, stress positions,” she admits, softly. “The more I did, the more inspired he became. He said he could hear the future, said he could hear God whispering his name, and I believed him; I believed everything he said. Whatever he requested, I could hack it. And if I couldn’t hack it, he told me to burn myself with cigarettes. But I could hack that too.” At this she shrugs, nearly imperceptibly, and allows herself a private smile. It is a wrenching, realistic depiction of the pride a person who is being manipulated by a loved one sometimes feels at being able to withstand, or even to accommodate, that loved one’s cruelty, as if the ability to do so were proof of compatibility and passion. In a coupling like this, the dominant partner’s voice becomes the whispering and insistent voice of God, tickling the ears of His eager devotee.
“Margaret is walking around with huge amounts of rage and terror,” Hall told an interviewer in 2022. “It’s easier to portray those in opposition; if you're portraying someone who’s trying to hide those things, you weirdly draw attention to them more than if you’re playing them. Suppressing anger, terror, anxiety, and panic is a more direct line to expressing it.” Anybody who has ever made the effort not to display any of these emotions for whatever reason knows exactly what she means—the energy that radiates from a person who is trying not to look scared or seem furious often rings louder alarm bells than if they had actually expressed their fear or ire in the first place. Hall situates Margaret with small, smart physical details: the way her eyes begin rattling like pinballs in her head as soon as she perceives a threat; the way her posture suggests the quivering tension of a runner who is waiting for the starting pistol at all times.
Resurrection (Andrew Semans, 2022).
The reason I describe her monologue as being tinged with lunacy is the same reason the role requires an actress of such acute sensitivity to keep the narrative on course. David—played with brilliantly sinister ordinariness by Roth—has reappeared in her life, following her daughter, stalking Margaret in department stores and on the street. His presence forces her to recount, in that terrifying speech, an event from their lives together which is so Grand Guignol, so grim and so Grimm, that in a lesser film the viewer might have laughed. At nineteen, Margaret fell pregnant, and although David insisted that she hold the baby in her body permanently as a “kindness,” she gave birth to a son, Ben. One day, David relented his usual brutal control of her and asked her to fetch something from the store, and when she returned home, two of her infant son’s fingers lay out on the countertop. “I begged David to tell me what he’d done with him, but all he’d say was that he’d eaten him up,” she says, plainly. “‘He’s in my belly now, Maggie.’ That’s what he’d say. Over and over.”
Before we have had time to fully decide whether this act of cannibalism is a metaphor, a psychotic hallucination, a case of folie à deux, or something more horribly real, Margaret hits us with another revelation. Soon enough, David began telling her that Ben remained alive inside him, crying out, and eventually Margaret heard him, too: “Suffering, trapped, but alive.” When the “kindnesses” became too much to bear, Margaret fled and adopted a new identity in the US, believing David would not find her. It is the young intern from that first scene she confesses all this to, perfectly calmly, and the girl’s reaction mirrors ours: “I don’t understand,” she says, her voice trembling. “I don’t get it. Is this some kind of joke, or is this a test for me? Because that’s horrible.”
What do we, the viewer, do with Margaret’s story? As she begins to negotiate with David in order to spare her daughter, we are left with numerous possible interpretations, and it is to Hall’s credit, and Roth’s, that all of them seem equally plausible. What if David is not actually a human man at all? Conversely: what if David is in fact a typical human man of a specific type, a skilled abuser and manipulator, and Ben’s supposed residence inside him is an inventive representation of the power such men manage to nurture as a means of controlling the women they have love-bombed, and then tortured, into meekness? Even as the film gets gorier and gorier, more and more like a Freudian midnight movie, we cannot know for sure.
Resurrection is audacious; it may also be the best showcase to date for Rebecca Hall’s signature style of performance, a blend of neuroticism and brittle poise that makes her believable as a professor or a scientist or a CEO, and also as the victim of a charismatic villain. Her perpetual dignity, even when being spooked or subjugated, helps to shore up the idea that it is not only naïve or stupid women who are spellbound by dark men, and that dignity is both rare and refreshing. There is some overlap, here, with the best and most notable qualities of the actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, whose innate intelligence and evident gameness allowed her to triumph over even the most degrading circumstances in her two most intimate collaborations with Lars von Trier, Antichrist (2009) and Nymphomaniac (2013).
The Night House (David Bruckner, 2021).
Between Resurrection and her earlier performance in 2021’s The Night House, Hall has sometimes been labelled a proto “scream queen,” although if this is the case, she is a very modern one. In The Night House, her character, Beth, has recently lost her husband, who committed suicide quite suddenly and left a curious note. Living alone in the house he designed for them, Beth senses a presence, and strange things begin to happen; she also finds mysterious photographs of a woman who resembles her on her husband’s laptop, closely followed by an entire folder of creepshots of more brunette women who look more or less the same. In death, he appears to be returning as a ghost. In life, it transpires that he was a killer, serially murdering numerous near-doppelgangers of his wife. As with Margaret’s phantom baby, it is difficult to know what is supposed to be genuinely supernatural, and what is supposed to be a metaphor, although The Night House is on balance a less successful and less eccentric film than Resurrection. Still, in both movies, a man proves physically or metaphysically inescapable, and in both films, too, Hall delivers a performance of such flinty and meticulous intensity that it is somewhat startling to see it in the context of a so-called “genre film.”
One relatively minor scene that occurs early in The Night House is a key to understanding Beth, and it is also a satisfying mirror of the monologue in Resurrection, with Hall’s female lead casually unloading an unpleasant anecdote, replete with sudden, shocking violence, on a woman whom she barely knows. Beth is a teacher, and the mother of a student, Hunter, comes to her to argue about her son’s grades, becoming irritable when Beth has to ask which of the Hunters in her class is being spoken about in the first place. “My husband shot himself in the head last Thursday,” she informs the mom, in the same tone one might use to say “I went to the dentist last Thursday.” “If you want to know, he took the boat out on the lake. He took a handgun that I didn’t even know that we owned. And pow! Right in the mouth. So, which Hunter got what grade on what high school elective speech class assignment, it really doesn’t matter to me right now.” Her grief feels authentic precisely because she treats the event of her husband’s death as if it is the realest thing ever to happen to her and, because it is too recent for her to have processed it entirely, as if it is unreal at the same time. This simultaneous reality and unreality characterizes The Night House itself, and as in Resurrection, Hall lends credibility to even the most extreme peaks of her derangement.
As Beth begins to unearth sickening truths about her husband, the question of how much we actually want to know about the ones we love hangs, spectrelike, over the picture. Her composure fraying, the grieving widow begins acting as desperately as a teenager going through an awful breakup, and while the prevailing mood—an impulse to gather information about the man who has, in a very literal sense, left her, to the point of psychological self-harm—is familiar, the circumstances—his performance of ritual occult murders—are not quite. Trust is, in its own way, another form of compliance, in the sense that it requires us to agree with another person’s version of events, and to blinker ourselves to their most concerning qualities in favor of assuming they will act in our best interests, or that we are capable of overlooking it when they do not. We never believe that Beth is really mad, just as we never believe Margaret is really mad, because even when their actions do not feel entirely rational, they feel true.
Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (Angela Robinson, 2017).
In Angela Robinson’s Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017), Hall plays yet another wife in an unusual marriage, this time to the academic, psychologist, and proud pervert William Marston (Luke Evans), who first created the character of Wonder Woman in 1941. It is difficult to imagine a character being more rational and sane than Hall’s Elizabeth, for whom sex is a science, and science is sex; her hauteur, at once erotic and intimidating, suggests a thrilling alembic of amusement and disdain. The movie itself is either an unusually edgy biopic, or an unusually vanilla film about S&M sex and polyamory, depending on how much the viewer cares about the history of comic-book characters, and how much they care about seeing attractive women getting spanked. The thrust, if you will pardon the expression, of the film is this: that Wonder Woman was inspired by one of Marston’s female students, Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcoate), whom Marston and his wife adopted as a lover and a muse. “Dominance, inducement, submission, and compliance,” Marston tells his students in a lecture.“All human relationships break down into the interplay between these categories of emotion. A person is most happy when they are submissive to a loving authority.” This feels like a very convenient position for a male psychologist circa 1941 to hold, but in reference to his own expanding relationship, he is right. As it happens, Olive desires to submit to Elizabeth first, long before her husband; Elizabeth herself is not really the type to submit to anyone at all, loving or not. “She is beautiful, guileless, kind, pure of heart,” Marston tells her when she asks him why he believes he needs both women in order to be happy. “And you are brilliant, ferocious, hilarious, and a grade-A bitch. Together, you are the perfect woman.” It is disappointing, really, to think that being “brilliant, ferocious, hilarious, and a grade-A bitch” is not enough in and of itself to make the perfect woman, but not terribly surprising based on anecdotal evidence and, frankly, lived experience.
Either way, Marston’s description of his wife sounds like my platonic ideal of a character played by Rebecca Hall. In contrast to Bella Heathcote’s wan and wide-eyed Olive, whose primary characteristics are “being blonde” and “being agreeable,” Elizabeth is steely, challenging, and somehow less like the damsel being tied up than like the rope itself—taut, irresistible, sexy precisely because of its constriction and immovability. (“Dear, we can’t fuck in the laboratory like animals,” she tells her husband, archly, in an early scene, in a voice that makes it clear that they are very much about to fuck in the laboratory like animals.) Hall’s performance, seen alongside Heathcote’s, reminded me of something that Pauline Kael once wrote about Jane Fonda: “As an actress, she has a special kind of smartness that takes the form of speed; she’s always a little ahead of everybody, and this quicker beat—this quicker responsiveness—makes her more exciting to watch.” Hall and Heathcote seem to be operating at differing numbers of frames a second, and it’s clear the younger actress is outmatched, even if the camera loves her. The same contrast is apparent in the 2007 Woody Allen film Vicky Cristina Barcelona, in which Hall stars with Scarlett Johannsson, whose lazy-eyed, gilded plushness works like gangbusters onscreen, but whose seduction merely targets the libido, as opposed to the mind.
As Elizabeth, Hall is at her least compliant, and perhaps at her most lovable as a result. When I read Manohla Dargis’s description of Hall’s “jaw line and brittle delivery [that] evoke Katharine Hepburn” in a review of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, it occurred to me that although she does a fine job of portraying women who bend almost to the point of breaking, it is a shame that the screwball comedy genre has died out, robbing her of the opportunity to be a truly Hepburnian love interest—eccentric, brainy, flighty, charming, the one doing the taming rather than the one being tamed. “I’m not some sort of very, very dark person,” she remarked in Vogue in 2021, on the subject of her tendency to play women on the verge. “I suppose I do have a strange compulsion to make things as hard for myself as they can be, otherwise I think I sort of lose interest on some level.” Such a role should hold her interest then, as being a smart woman who refuses to conform or minimize herself pursuing a relationship is hard, even if it is not necessarily as hard as being pursued by death itself, or by a man who claims to have eaten your baby (“brilliant, ferocious, hilarious, and a grade-A bitch,” lest we forget, not being enough). Hall is an unparalleled master at depicting the darker side of the heterosexual dialectic, in which the best a woman can hope for is enduring elegantly and with dignity. It would be refreshing, though, to see her in an onscreen coupling again that illustrated the warmer, more pleasurable parts of sex and romance—one where she could really play, instead of embodying more women who contort themselves in the face of brutality and cruelty, and who have misheard the lyrics of love’s song until it proves to be entirely too late.