This review contains NO spoilers. Nobody should be spoiled for Resolution. Just watch it.
Resolution earns a full 5/5 Meth Pipes, and the coveted Different Review Format Than Normal. You should absolutely see it. Be warned however that, while it doesn't have much violence or anything sexual or even anything particularly scary other than ideas, it has enough F-Bombs that if you bleeped them, you would be communicating in morse code. So be aware of that if you have concerns about language. This movie has more language than the Tower of Babel.
The plot of the movie, at least initially, is very simple: There's a guy who does nothing but smoke meth all day and think that a dog is helping him write a book about squirrels. Another guy who was his friend before he spiralled into drugs sets out to his remote cabin and chains him to the wall to force him to dry out for a week and see if he can convince him to go into rehab. Endless interruptions by incredibly weird people ensue.
It's entirely possible that this movie just caught me at the right moment or just happens to work for me personally, but I thought it was amazing. I was trapped at my wife's office for several hours (on the rare occasions that I leave my house, I usually ride into town with her, which means I'm stuck there as long as she is), so unlike at home where I seek constant distraction, I was glued to this screen with headphones in and nothing else to do for the entire movie, so I paid close attention the whole time. And I was rewarded for my effort with a truly unique experience.
This is one of those really strange meta-movies that's talking about more than what you see onscreen. Everything is operating on at least 2 levels. But if you put that part aside for a moment and just focus on what you're actually seeing, it's still great. The characters are all extremely quirky and interesting, and I hadn't really thought about that until this movie, but most movies have totally generic characters. This is the tough guy, this is the girl who lost her parents. In this movie, every character is totally off-the-wall, nothing you would ever expect, and it feels like there's a huge backstory behind each of them. There most likely isn't, but that's okay, their dialogue makes the movie entertaining, and that's before you even get to the plot. There are parts where I laughed out loud, even though kids were being tutored in the other room.
The plot, I won't spoil. But it's some weird paranormal stuff going on here, and it builds up until ... well, an ending I really enjoyed, and had some difficulty comprehending. I confess that afterwards I read some IMDB discussions and went "OH SNAP" to ones that helped me expand on what I was thinking, and that made me enjoy it even more. So this is definitely a thinker of a movie, and it's got things to say (I won't tell you about what, because you should be as unspoiled as possible), and at the same time it's fun to watch on a pure entertainment level. I actually liked the resolution of Resolution, not just the weird stuff but actually how the human story was resolved. Which in itself sort of breaks the rules of the movie, but I won't get into that. Just watch it.
