Review: Rebecca Hall’s thrilling performance breathes life into the creepy ‘Resurrection’

What makes Margaret run? It’s her morning exercise regimen, but her demonic pace and half-panicked, half-determined expression suggest something else; Margaret, played by the ever-brilliant Rebecca Hall, doesn’t seem to be running toward so much as away from something. Margaret and Abbie’s well-observed bond — full of mutual affection, even as the latter increasingly chafes under the former’s tight reins — is one of the best things about “Resurrection.” When strange things start to happen to Abbie — a weird discovery, a biking accident — we naturally share Margaret’s parental concern. But Hall’s peerless ability to get under a protagonist’s skin, previously on display in the biographical drama “Christine” and the supernatural horror film “The Night House,” compels us to take Margaret seriously. Like Alex Garland’s recent, more demonstratively unhinged “Men,” with which it would make an enjoyably shivery feminist-horror double bill, “Resurrection” doesn’t entirely shake off the feel of a genre picture wrapped around a carefully worked-out thesis, one that’s sometimes overly eager to make sure we don’t miss its #MeToo-era resonance or its feminist-horror bona fides.