Initially, Resurrection comes across as your standard stalker thriller, albeit one with an exceptional lead performance by Rebecca Hall. Hall plays Margaret, a confident, blunt and driven business woman who lives a comfortable life in Albany, New York with her teenage daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman). She mentors a young woman named Gywn (Angela Wong Carbone) both professionally and personally, giving her relationship advice and showing how she takes the threat of men in particular very seriously. One day, David (Tim Roth), a man from her past life in England, suddenly shows up around her place of work. Things rapidly begin to spiral out of control as Margaret’s current life unravels amid a flurry of panic attacks, nightmares, and demons she thought she’d left behind.

David is an abusive ex-boyfriend who has arrived with nothing but malicious intent in the way so many abusers do. Roth plays him with an unsettlingly light tone of voice that would sound sweet if it weren’t for the obvious evil it’s attempting to mask. David’s demeanor (and what’s eventually revealed about him) is but one of the many ways that Resurrection dips into horror territory, and the further the film goes, the more the insanity from all sides ramps up and the scarier things get. By the time you reach its brutal, cathartic yet somewhat perplexing fever dream of an ending, Resurrection has dived down into the deep end of horror and is all the stronger of a movie for it.

Written and directed by Andrew Semans (Nancy, Please), the film does a remarkable job at showing the ways Margaret’s past experiences have affected and shaped her into who she is, and in turn, how she reacts when those experiences come back into her life without warning. She has a massive trauma response to David reappearing and starts pushing everyone in her life away, including Abbie, who Margaret is determined to keep in the dark about David. He dominates her thoughts to the point where she can no longer focus on work or maintain any of her relationships in a good way. She’s an ever-increasing wreck.

The more David inserts himself back into Margaret’s life, the more she tragically, naturally falls back into her old harmful habits and behaviors. It’s an uncomfortably honest look at the manifestation of abuse and how it begets further abuse; how it feels when you’re far gone, deep into an abusive relationship and the ways the abuser continues to manipulate and assert control. David’s mental manipulation of Margaret, coupled with vague physical threats towards both her and Abbie, are especially despicable. It’s no wonder that Maragaret completely falls apart the way she does.

The turning point truly comes at a pivotal, direct-to-camera monologue that Hall delivers in the second act. Exhausted yet adrenalized, paranoid yet somewhat defeated, Margaret unloads the entire story of her past with David to poor Gywn late one night in the office. As Margaret finally shares her increasingly disturbing tale of her life before fleeing to America, she spills all of her secrets in a single take shot that steadily moves in on her face, the light around her darkening to eventually match the pitch-black darkness of where her story goes. Cinematographer Wyatt Garfield does tremendous work in this film, but like Hall, this bit is his finest moment. Gywn, meanwhile, has no choice but to awkwardly stand in the doorway and listen to what is likely one of the most upsetting things she’s ever heard. Margaret has to get the story out, down to every grisly little detail.

Resurrection holds some strong similarities to Chloe Okuno’s Watcher, another stalker-themed thriller that hit theaters earlier this year. Like Watcher, Resurrection maintains the singular point of view of its main character throughout the entirety of the film. What’s more, the constant gaslighting and disbelief / apathy of other characters end up almost turning the stars of both films into unreliable narrators, where their questioning of their own sanity and reality is so strongly felt that audiences may begin to doubt them as well.

The biggest likeness between the two is the sheer fact that both films are able to become genuinely terrifying when need be, embracing the pure horror aspects of their respective stories. Accompanied with a standout score from Jim Williams, Resurrection excels at creating an atmosphere of dread and anxiety where every moving part from the actors to the direction to the lighting to the costuming are all working in tandem to stress you out. It's a thriller with real bite, one that sticks with you even if its ambiguous, dreamlike finale leaves you cold. Prepare for thrills beyond what you may be expecting.

'Resurrection' is now playing in theaters and available to rent online.