Resurrected abandons its most enticing mystery.
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In my recent review of Heretic, I noted that religion and horror movies are natural bedfellows. Both deal in the realms of the unknown and both can provide comfort in facing some of our basest fears. But there's been a surge in recent horror movies where the fanatical faithful open doors that probably should've stayed closed. Which brings us to Resurrected, a found-footage horror movie about a world where the Catholic church has found a way to bring back the dead.
The Setup
The movie begins with a horrific car crash that severely injures Stanely Martin and kills his young son Nicholas. At the depths of Stanely and his wife Audrey's grief, they get an unthinkable reprieve: the Catholic church bring Nicholas back to life. Cut to a few years later in a very different world, Stanley is now a priest and online counselor for "resurrected persons" or RPs. And one of his counsels has just committed a horrific series of murders...
Resurrected is one of the most frustrating movies I've watched in recent memory. Not because it's bad through and through, but because it is pretty smart and effective...until the end. Which means talking about why this movie irritated me will involve a giant spoiler.
The good news is that I can point out what I like about this movie which will help explain my frustration down the line.
To the filmmakers' credit, Resurrected is taking a giant, world-changing swing on a shoestring budget and using the Searching approach to found footage (i.e. everything is told through video on a computer screen including texts, calls etc.)/ Which is hard to do unless you lay down a lot of world-building up front. This is what the movie gets really right.
It accounts for the societal shift that this would cause in terms of religiousity amongst the populace, the issues this would cause for people who were brought back, and opens some ideas for how the church would handle this newfound power including a series of hackers who determine if someone is resurrection worthy and the first man impacted by all of this goes from regular guy to online preacher and counselor.
We've also got a mountain of obvious concerns about resurrecting people including moral implications and whatever the secret is behind these alleged miracles.
So when one of Stanely's folks goes on a murder spree, it puts a crack in the facade (that was already shaky to begin with) and hints at something nefarious going on either in how the church is operating and how this is happening in the first place. And along the way Stanely needs to find purpose and connection which he finds in a hacker ally called Rat (she rules).
The first 60 minutes of the movie all have that sweet spot of silly, scary and conspiratorial that makes the best X-Files episode work. The main issue any movie with this concept is going to have is...how do you pay this off? And this is where the movie shoots itself in the foot. So....big time spoilers ahead.
The Conspiracy
Early in the film and his investigation into his parishioner's violent spree, Stanely discovers a troubling trend. This isn't the first time this has happened. A number of other resurrected people have gone on to kill not just strangers, but also members of their family. And all of the sessions with these people, that are recorded, have gone mising and all of the priests who spoke to these people are unreachable.
On top of that, Stanely's main contact, a bishop, assures him that the people who committed these heinous acts either hid their true nature from their online hacker/research department or had a compounding medical issue.
This all reeks of conspiracy and the bishop's answer sounds like bullshit. And just when Stanely has hit rock bottom and brings himself back, he's given his post back...only to see another one of his parishioners has killed his entire family and is looking to kill more.
So something about the resurrection itself is wrong and being hidden from the public thanks to the church's now massive resources right?
Not really.
The Reveal
The ultimate pay off is that a large swathe of the resurrected persons, including a bunch of their hackers, have been planning a purge of the living to "make them all understand." Someting akin to a murderous/suicide death cult that's been using it's connections to the church and this skilled group of hackers to hide its plans until it's too late. Rat and Stanely end up dead, Stanely takes the rap as the group's organizer, despite not being a resurrected person himself, and millions end up dead in the chaos.
And apparently the church knew nothing about this.
This pissed me off for a number of reasons.
The first is that narratively, this is supremely unsatisfying. I understand that in this reality the church has employed a bunch of hackers and given them untold access to information, but the idea that so many of these hackers are resurrected people that can easily scrub the church's records without anyone noticing is a little suspect. Unless the chuch is in on it somehow.
So while the violent payoff to the film makes narrative sense and gives the film a nice dramatic crescendo, there's little to no evidence that this is where the film's been leading the whole time.
So while the violent payoff to the film makes narrative sense and gives the film a nice dramatic crescendo, there's little to no evidence that this is where the film's been leading the whole time.
It also completely ignores the film's biggest burning question. How is the church bringing people back?
This seems so obvious to me as a question your horror movie about rescurrecting the dead should answer. It's also the easiest narrative answer for what's going on. If something is wrong with the process that explains why these people are going murder crazy and also why folks would want to cover it up. The church's miracle could be viewed as false and they would lose the substantial power they've gained.
And then we get into the Catholic church aspect of it all.
Giant Metaphor Missed
Before I start, I want to be clear that the Catholic church is not the only faith community that has had members of its clergy abuse young people. But in term of scale, cover-up and beyond, the Catholic church is pretty horrific. One of the most galling things about the repeated abuse of children by priests, wasn't just that it was happening. It was that the church was fuly aware of it and instead of removing priests from the priesthood entirely, would move a predator from one parish to another without letting anyone in the new parish know. It was a conspiracy to keep everyone quiet that everyone also knew about. An open secret.
If the primary faith for your movie is Catholicism, and you start introducing the idea of this "open secret conspiracy," there's an easy, on-the-nose metaphor to apply. Because a big part of the reason priests could abuse children is not just because they were adults dealing with children, but also because they could prop up a child's salvation to get what they wanted.
So if someone starts to dig into a conspiracy involving the Catholic church that holds an incredible power, in this case a literal resurrection versus the resurrection of the soul the church has historically offered its parishioners, we've got a lot of parallel's to the church's known sins.
But no. It's a cult of resurrected people. And the church didn't know about it. Even though they're the ones doing the resurrection...who also have this army of hackers...who also have records of every person they've brought back...who also counsel all of them.
It feels more than a little off to let the church off the hook in this movie. Because whether the movie wants to say so or not, they created this problem. They started resurrecting people, without warning, and seemingly never thought to ask whether or not that was moral.
And instead of dealing with that morality, Resurrected offers a cop out.
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