Killed by Kindness: ‘Resurrection’ and the Emotional Cost of Caregiving [Matriarchy Rising]
Rebecca Hall’s latest film, Resurrection, is a bit of a mind fuck. What starts as a fairly straightforward story of an overprotective mother struggling to let her daughter grow up unfolds in bizarre ways to make an eerie statement about parenthood, gaslighting, and trauma. Written and directed by Andrew Semans, Resurrection follows Maggie (Hall), a single mother who’s carefully constructed world begins to crumble with the return of a lover from her past. With an impossible conclusion, the film offers no clear answers. Instead, it validates the complex emotions that accompany raising children in an uncontrollable world.
Maggie has built her life around boundaries. Wearing the same colorless suits every day, she travels back and forth between work and home, only socializing with Peter (Michael Esper), the married coworker she’s sleeping with. Maggie lends a sympathetic ear to her young intern Gwyn (Angela Wong Carbone), listening to stories of a toxic boyfriend, but keeps everyone at arm’s length. Her teenage daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman) is the only one allowed to penetrate her inner circle. Maggie dotes on her child and it’s clear she’s spent the last 17 years trying to protect her from every conceivable harm. Just two weeks away from Abbie’s 18th birthday, Maggie becomes consumed with worry about who will protect her daughter when she leaves for college two hours away. It’s not until later in the film that we understand why.
At a work conference, Maggie sees a man in another row that she seems to recognize. Instantly jumping up, she stumbles out of the room and sprints home to check on her daughter. This strange man lurks around the periphery of her life for days before Maggie finally gathers the courage to confront him. He is David (Tim Roth), a handsome and charismatic biologist she met when she was 18. Though significantly older, David charmed Maggie’s parents and convinced her to move in with him just weeks after meeting. He began a system of emotional manipulation by asking her for kindnesses; gifts of service he claimed to use as inspiration. At first these kindnesses were simple domestic tasks like cooking a meal or cleaning the house. But they were never reciprocated and began to escalate in dangerous ways.
The kindnesses eventually became tools of abuse. David would ask her to walk outside without shoes or meditate for hours in extreme positions. He claimed that with every act of service, he could hear the voice of God whispering his name. Too young to realize what was happening, Maggie went along with it. If she failed a kindness, he would command her to burn herself with cigarettes. She gave up her passion for drawing and began to build her life solely around pleasing him. These kindnesses fed David’s massive ego and he slowly convinced her that happiness could only be found by serving him.
When Maggie realized she was pregnant, David sensed a threat to the control he’d been cultivating. He forbade her from giving birth and tried to stop it in ways she doesn’t elaborate on. He knew that once the baby arrived, his love would no longer be the most important thing in her life and he was desperate to maintain control. Maggie named the baby Ben and David watched as all his fears came to fruition. All of the devotion he commanded from Maggie was now going to Ben.
Weeks after the birth, he sent her to the market. Maggie returned to find the baby gone, with only a couple of his fingers left on the counter. David claimed to have eaten Ben up but said that the baby was still alive inside his belly. When he reappears in Maggie’s life 22 years later, he claims the same thing: Ben is still alive inside him, crying and longing for the return of his mother who abandoned him.
We will never know what actually happened to baby Ben. But we do know that it’s impossible for an infant to survive in the belly of a human for more than two decades. This leaves us with the task of piecing apart what actually happened. The most likely answer is that David killed the baby (perhaps best not to speculate on how) and used the influence he’d been cultivating to convince her that Ben was still alive. Making himself the pregnant parent, David was able to become the center of attention again. He has now explicitly tied the survival of Maggie’s baby to himself, ensuring massive guilt if she were ever to leave him.
In their final, climactic conversation, David equates himself with the baby. He says that only by taking him back and performing more kindnesses will Maggie be able to see him again. He’s once again managed to convince her that he is the only key to her happiness. Still grieving the child she once lost, Maggie chooses to believe him. She gives in to the fantasy that she can somehow erase this terrible trauma.
Another reading of Resurrection is that Maggie chose to leave Ben as well as David when she fled to America. While there is no reason to doubt what Maggie claims David told her, by refusing to give us any clear answers, Semans is able to tap into the fear many survivors of abuse experience when giving birth. We’ve already survived a partner who controlled every aspect of our lives. Now we’re asked to do it all over again with a baby.
Some mothers with PTSD from sexual trauma find it extremely hard to breastfeed especially if the baby is assigned the same gender as their attacker. After so many kindnesses demanded by David, perhaps Maggie simply couldn’t stomach the thought of being beholden to another man. Mothering an infant would require years of domestic tasks like feeding and cleaning, the same acts of service that began David’s kindnesses. Maybe she left David and the baby because she couldn’t handle the thought of giving anymore of her kindness away. Maybe David’s story of eating Ben is simply what she had to tell herself to justify her decision to leave.
What we do know is that Maggie is triggered by a perfect storm of outside factors. Her daughter is preparing to leave the safety of her home at the same age Maggie was when she first fell into David’s clutches. Maggie’s relationship with Peter also seems to be deepening. She calls him to come over on two consecutive evenings and he mentions taking her on a weekend getaway. After sex, she begisn to open up about her past and mentions a passion for drawing. These two factors combined would likely be enough to trigger what Abbie refers to as “an episode.”
But a third trigger seems to push Maggie over the edge. In the opening scene, Gwyn tells her about her boyfriend’s habit of making cruel jokes at her expense. Maggie advises Gwyn to leave him, saying she deserves someone who is kind to her. In their next conversation, Gwyn describes doing just that. She asked him to stop mocking her and he responded by asking for something in return. What would she do for him? What kindness could she provide? Gwyn never uses the word “kindness”, yes. But the transactional nature of this interaction would likely trigger Maggie’s memories of being required to pay for David’s love with her pain and suffering. Hearing Gwyn’s description of this breakup would cause her to relive the fear of David’s punishments if she ever tried standing up to him.
It’s also possible to assume that David does not actually return to Maggie’s life and that every interaction is a projection of her past trauma. Maybe her fear of what will happen to Abbie in the real world is causing her to call up David’s memory as a way of accessing the abusive structure that once provided an illusion of safety. She knows she can’t control her daughter’s life. But maybe if she starts doing the kindnesses again—walking to work with no shoes, or meditating in the park—that will be enough to appease either the real David or the David that lives in her head.
When describing the kindnesses, David says they “ease the pain, quiet the noise.” Maybe she’s choosing to complete the kindnesses as a kind of magical thinking to ease the pain of letting her daughter go and quiet the noise that she is losing control.
Part of David’s insidiousness is that he is an expert gaslighter. He blames Maggie for Ben’s death and convinces her to do the same. When describing her past, Maggie describes losing her baby as something bad she did when she was younger. To her, it’s something she should rot in hell for. She believes she failed to protect her child. She doesn’t explicitly blame David for killing him. Instead, she blames herself for trusting him with her baby. But David is responsible for it all. He tortured her. He sent her out of the house and he killed her baby. It’s understandable that Maggie might blame herself for getting involved with David. But none of what happens afterward is her fault.
Yet that’s the province of mothers. The world gaslights us into believing that we should be able to protect our children at all costs. If we don’t, we’ve failed. We are bad mothers. Tasked with protecting the life of a helpless infant, we’re asked to give all of ourselves for our children’s survival. When describing motherhood, Maggie says that once you become a mother you become disposable. Our own lives and bodies become tools we’re expected to use to ensure the survival of our offspring. An infant has no malice in asking for these kindnesses. But watching an adult David demand the same kind of devotion, we can see the emotional cost of this constant service.
Maggie continually states that she will hurt or kill anyone who tries to harm her children. Creeped out by this intensity, Abbie tells her that these statements are for Maggie, not her. She doesn’t need to hear them like her mother needs to say them. Maggie desperately needs to believe that she can keep the world safe for her daughter. She senses the fact that she is losing another child and clings tightly to any control she can find.
Her final scene in Resurrection is no more reality than the thought that she could cut a living baby out of David’s stomach. It’s a fantasy she constructs in order to get through the terrifying days, months, and years of her daughter’s adulthood. Maggie imagines the version of her daughter that makes her feel like a good mother and hears her daughter say that she’s not scared anymore. Maggie has made everything OK. She’s figured out how to do the impossible and protect her child in an uncontrollable world.
It’s tempting to believe that if we just do everything right, if we’re as kind as we can possibly be, if we give enough of ourselves, it will be enough. We can make everything ok and our children will live a life of safety and happiness. But the reality is that sometimes tragedy and pain strike no matter how carefully we’ve planned. The world is uncontrollable and having a child means living with the terror that they could be torn away from us at any moment. Maggie’s slipping smile and final gasp at the end of Resurrection reveal that she knows this, too. A perfect life with perfectly safe children is nothing more than a fantasy.
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