WHAT IS IT ABOUT
Resurrection is Bi Gan’s love letter to Chinese cinema and to cinephiles in general. It imagines a future where, not unlike ours, humans have stopped dreaming, and a small group of authorities hunts the last remaining dreamer, whom they call a Deliriant. When a woman finally finds him, she is struck by the contrast between his monstrous appearance and his fragile body. Realizing that he is close to death, instead of simply erasing him, she decides to let him rest peacefully by installing a film projector inside his back, and turning his body into a machine that will replay his past lives one final time.
What follows is a century-long journey told through a series of chapters. The last dreamer is reborn again and again within the projector beam, each time in a different era, captured through a different mode of filmmaking. He moves from a silent black and white expressionist horror film to a wartime noir around a murder and a mysterious pen, into a Chinese fable in a remote monastery, then to a drama about a con artist and a young girl who cheat gamblers by smelling playing cards, and finally to a more contemporary romance between a street punk and a vampire on the eve of the year two thousand. Each chapter speaks to a different era of cinema and to a different way of sensing the world: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, and finally something closer to memory and consciousness. The story is deliberately loose and fragmentary. The film is less concerned with a standard narrative and plot mechanics and more with the feeling of drifting through these images, taking the audience, as much as the strange creature, on a journey of rediscovering the act of dreaming through cinema.
CONTEXT
Following the ambitious and acclaimed Long Day’s Journey into Night in 2018, his second feature film, which made it into the Cannes Un Certain Regard line-up, Bi, still a relatively young Chinese director, struggled to figure out what his next step in cinema should look like. He first wrote a drama based on a real-life murderer, but, during the pandemic, decided to scrap that and go back to the territory of his previous two films, taking the same themes of time, memory, and dreams into even more ambitious and expensive territory, while more openly incorporating his love for cinema. Resurrection is the film that came out of that decision, mixing support from China and France and shooting in three main phases. It premiered in the Cannes Competition, where it received a Special Award from the jury, but also divided critics and audiences, enchanting many with how visually absorbing it is and confusing others with how loose, cryptic, and structurally fragmented its storytelling can feel.
THE REVIEW
Resurrection is not an easy film to grasp. Similar to another complex 2025 Cannes premiere, The Secret Agent, it is a film whose pieces only really come together at the end. It benefits from multiple viewings, and even then, not everything will make sense. The first two dreams, in particular, are especially vague about what is actually going on and feel like the director tapping into his desire to emulate the cinematic language of those periods and genres without really telling us an engaging story. That is by design, since Bi Gan’s intention is foremost to capture each era, but at times it ends up feeling more like the movie version of a film school class than a fully formed film.
Taken on those terms, though, it does make for a great class. It conveys many techniques and executes them flawlessly, often at the expense of caring about the people on screen. The cinematography and production design are fantastic, both for respecting what they are recreating and for standing out as memorable on their own. The mise-en-scène is often stunning, especially in the thirty-minute-long shot in the last chapter, which took a month to record because they could only attempt it once a day. It is not surprising that the film’s trailer is among the year’s best, since watching these images in succession really does feel like flipping through a century of cinema in fast forward.
Because the chapters are so loosely connected, with each one adopting its own visual language and the protagonist looking completely different in every segment, it is left to M83’s score to make everything feel as if it belongs in the same film. The music does a strong job there, maturing and blending genres on its own terms but always through modern instrumentation, which gives the film its particular atmosphere and becomes its main cohesive thread.
By the third and fourth chapters, the narrative becomes clearer, and these exercises finally start to support the story. The relationship between the con and the girl is well built through their dialogue and the way they slowly open up to each other, helped by precise close-ups and longer takes. The patience in editing a particular poolside scheme is particularly noteworthy; it not only stretches the tension but also reveals how much the man has come to care about the girl. Similarly, the continuous shot in the vampire chapter contributes to the romance that grows throughout the night as the couple goes through their own version of hell. The amount of style Bi Gan pours into this neon-soaked last chapter is impressive, especially in its use of color and precise blocking.
Performances do not truly get much space to stand out. Jackson Yee does solid work across the shifts, but the film keeps him at a distance, and only the little girl in the con chapter really stands out. The pacing is generally good as well, giving each chapter enough time. The length is not a problem once the film reaches its two more narrative-driven chapters, where form and story feel closer together. The first two, however, can test the audience’s endurance and cause some people to give up before Bi reaches a better balance, primarily because it is hard to make sense of much of what is going on. The film concludes with a fantastic final scene in which the core idea finally clicks into place.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Bi Gan takes us on an ambitious tour of cinema history, compressing a century of evolution of this still relatively young art into a series of long, immersive dreams. The early chapters often struggle to balance style and story and can feel like precise and impressive, but distant, exercises. Yet the film finds its footing in the last two, where the form finally serves the characters rather than the other way around. It ends on such a strong note that it may well resurrect a love for the art in any dormant cinephile.