Resurrection (2022)

If this film were a monster movie instead of a realist psychological thriller, we might not argue about whether it’s all in her head. That’s one of several games being played here. Or let’s call it the all-day disco: in addition to the gaslight tango, we have the realism shuffle, and the mamabear stomp. One trick here is that this is a monster movie, and it’s not realism. Or we subvert both categories: a realist monster movie. After all, the inciting tension in most monster movies, and certainly those that aren’t explicitly B-movies, is the gradual-to-sudden unveiling of the irrational world, and the ways the rational world resists its exposure as artifice. The monster turns out to be real, and the good old normal daily bullshit is the myth. And here’s why gender so often plays into the monster narrative as both point (convention) and counterpoint (queerness). One monster is born of oppressive heterosexual norms, and another is born from the panic over any transgression from those norms.

Here be monsters and spoilers:
Resurrection shows us monstrous reality and the dark surface homophobes and transphobes ignore in the panic over those perverts grooming our children. The monster here is an upstanding professional man who grooms a teenage girl by first wooing her parents, and eventually taking her under his control. They have a child, and he, um, takes control of him as well. Meanwhile, his sadistic requests for “kindness” involving ritual humiliation and stress positions is another kind of grooming: he’s making another monster. That’s three of them, including the one he will carry to term via hotel room C-section 22 years later. Which is also to say he is a monstrous mother, serially accusing his now-grown child lover that she is a bad mother. Those accusations are on his lips until the end, as he surrenders the miraculous child he has absorbed and incubated in stasis for two decades.

Like we said, realism. The film leaves open the simultaneous possibilities that a) his requests for kindness (she has to walk to work barefoot, and assume a stress position for hours in a public park) present her as unstable while also destabilizing her (and reinstating her monstrous training); and b) his reappearance in her life might be a function of a psychotic break triggered by lingering trauma and separation anxiety as her teenage daughter, now the age her mother was when she met the monster, prepares to leave for college. No doubt this complex set of open possibilities will be reduced by some viewers and reviewers as an Is it all in her head? scenario, which is unfortunate. Because what we have here is a realist monster movie that shows the rational world cut open and spewing guts. If we can’t see what’s right in front of us, we not only don’t believe her, we don’t believe ourselves. 3.5 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—J †Johnson