104 min | R | July 29, 2022 | IFC Films
Margaret has built a quiet, controlled life for herself and her teenage daughter. Then a man from her past appears at the edge of a crowd and everything she buried starts clawing its way back. The horror here is not the monster. It is what she is willing to do to survive him.
Margaret runs her life like a machine. She manages a sterile corporate job, mentors a younger colleague, and keeps a tight grip on her college-bound daughter Abbie. The control is the tell. When a man named David surfaces at a conference, the structure she built around herself begins to collapse from the inside. Andrew Semans makes a film about trauma that refuses the language of recovery, and instead asks what a survivor owes to the version of herself that survived.
Rebecca Hall plays Margaret as a woman performing stability until the performance cracks. She delivers a long unbroken monologue to her young colleague Gwyn, a confession that runs for minutes without a cut, and Hall lets the composure drain out of her face in real time. Tim Roth plays David with a soft, reasonable calm that is worse than any threat. He never raises his voice. He simply states impossible things as fact and waits for Margaret to accept them. Grace Kaufman plays Abbie as a daughter who registers her mother’s unraveling before she understands its source.
Semans wrote and directed the film, and his script trusts silence and repetition to do the work. The camera holds on Hall in long static takes, and the restraint forces the audience to sit inside Margaret’s deterioration rather than watch it from a distance. The production design keeps her apartment cold and orderly, which makes the intrusions feel like contamination. Semans then escalates the psychological dread into literal body horror, and the swerve is grotesque and divisive by design. The final stretch abandons ambiguity for something physical and unresolved.
This is a film about a woman who decides that the only way out of a trap is to walk further into it. Margaret’s logic is monstrous and internally consistent, and Hall sells the consistency even when the events stop making sense. The ending splits the audience because it commits to her delusion instead of explaining it. Semans builds a precise machine of dread and then detonates it. The result is uneven, but the performance at its center never wavers.