Resurrection: The Mother And Child Reunion

"No, I would not give you false hope
On this strange and mournful day
But the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away"

                    -“Mother And Child Reunion,” Paul Simon

There’s this old joke…

Q: Why did the Vietnam veteran cross the road?
A: You wouldn’t know! You weren’t there!

And as much as it might lean into the cliché of veterans of that war being especially vocal about how their plight was not really understood, there’s also truth to it. If you did not directly experience a trauma, there’s no way you can understand what it was like. It is something than can only be understood through the experience itself. And so from the outside, a lot of what trauma survivors do might not make a lot of sense. This extends to abuse as well, often a source of trauma. “Why didn’t you just leave?” is the question asked by someone who wasn’t there.

And it’s this truth that lies at the heart of Resurrection, which is a harrowing story of abuse, trauma, guilt, and the way none of it ever really goes away.

It opens on a conversation between two people. We only see one of them in the shot, and she’s relating to the other the way she is being treated by her partner, who devalues and belittles her on a regular basis. The voice of the person off-camera is calm, measured, asking her questions about how these things make her feel, contextualizing these behaviors, As she responds, her face cycles through uncertainty, shame, confusion, and anger. At first, you think this is our protagonist, and she’s at therapy.

But that’s not the case - the voice off-screen belongs to our protagonist. Her name is Margaret Ballion, and she isn’t a therapist, she works at a biotech company, and she’s talking to her co-worker Gwyn, who is beginning to realize that her relationship isn’t a healthy one. Margaret, as we learn following through her day, is efficient, motivated, and highly independent. She’s presenting data at work, she’s going for a run, she’s waking up her teenage daughter Abbie, she’s having sex with a married coworker. She loves her daughter, she runs, she’s insightful about abuse, and she keeps other close relationships at arm’s length. It’s not a life for everyone, but Margaret seems to thrive in it.

At least, she does until she spots a familiar face at a conference. His name is David, and she hasn’t seen him in a very, very long time. And that’s when the memories start. And the nightmares.

What this film does best is beautifully capture the feeling when someone reencounters their abuser and how all of the growth, all of the change, all of the progress just melts away and you’re back to being that small, helpless thing again. Margaret already seems like she’s keeping everyone (except her daughter) distant. So you sort of know that she’s been through some shit before you actually know any particulars. In some ways, she’s not that different from the protagonist to Matriarch, albeit finding much more adaptive ways to cope. There’s that sense of running, and running is part of her life. And when she reencounters David, all of that crisp efficiency in work, in sex, in life, it all starts to crumble almost immediately. Is the life she’s built for herself over the last couple of decades really that fragile, or was David just that awful? It’s kind of both, really. The spiral is quick and painful to watch, in no small part because Margaret immediately locks down and tries to deal with it all by herself. A lot of this is about control - abusers exert it, and their survivors spend years, maybe the rest of their life trying to reclaim it. For all of her good insight and advice to Gwyn, Margaret’s a classic example of someone who can’t see for themselves what they see for others and the results are tragic.

The setting and visuals are an important part of how the story gets told. It takes place mostly in modern structures, lots of glass, concrete, everything sleek and polished, with one example standing out as an exception, a place seedier and uglier amidst everything else. In that moment, it feels like you’re visiting the monster in its den. The score is dominated by urgent strings, suggesting something pulling tight enough to snap and the pull of a treacherous undercurrent. But even more important than the sights and sounds are the performances, which are uniformly strong - the opening scene, where Gwyn’s experience is written all over her face, sets the tone. David’s sadism is starkly apparent without an ounce of scenery-chewing. This is a man who knows the control he has, how complete it is, and how easily he can reassert it. He knows exactly where Margaret’s soft spots are, and he uses that leverage quietly, but directly and mercilessly. Abbie is a believable teenage girl, someone who has lived with a mother who’s maybe a touch too protective, but not so much that she can’t speak her mind. Margaret, who seems so self-possessed and self-assured at the beginning, disintegrates over the course of the film without it ever tipping over into melodrama. The wideness in her eyes, the nervousness in her voice, even something as simple as messy hair registers as something meaningful, and the first act ends with Margaret finally revealing everything in a monologue about her time with David. It’s a long unbroken shot that goes on and on and on and on, and at the end of it, a light has gone out in her eyes. You almost need to come up for air once it’s over.

It’s not an especially violent film (until it is, and then whoo boy), a lot is suggested or happens offscreen, and that’s for the good. It reinforces the idea that once you’re in someone’s head like David is, you don’t have to shout or beat someone to get them to do what you want. Just get them where they’re vulnerable, and you’ve got them forever. There’s research into classical conditioning that suggests that old responses aren’t ever totally extinguished, that they can reassert themselves, and that’s very much what happens here. All it takes is for that one person to reenter someone’s life, and they’re right back where they were. Everything Margaret’s built begins to disintegrate, and since we spend the whole film with her, it becomes sort of difficult to know how much of this we should trust. Not in a schlocky way, the film plays pretty fair and there are little blink-and-you-miss-it bits of ambiguity that the film doesn’t bother to resolve. Which is good, a little uncertainty helps films like these, and it never really lands on one side or another. Like, if you wanted to read this as a story of mistaken identity leading someone to spiral into delusion, you could. Or you could take it as face value, the film isn’t telling you what to think. Like last week’s film and so many before that, the idea that a mother will do anything for her child is not a new one or one that always goes happy places.

There is the fairly obvious idea that if Margaret had just come clean about her past when shit started going down, then none of this would have happened. And yes, that’s true. But it doesn’t take into consideration the shame, the need to take of it yourself, the need to prove that you aren’t that person anymore, that fear that nobody will believe you, all of which are pretty common consequences to abuse. It doesn’t go the obvious route for a conclusion, though I didn’t find the end quite as “bonkers” or “batshit insane” as some others did. To me, it seemed like a logical conclusion to what came before, given how David treated Margaret. Nor did I see the ending as “unrealistically happy” like another critic did. These are all the kinds of responses you would expect from someone who has never been subjected to what Margaret had to live with. You wouldn’t know - you weren’t there.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon