Resurrection Review: Bi Gan’s Elegy for Time, Sensation, and Cinema

Bi Gan’s “Resurrection” arrives not as a mere film, but as a vast, sighing edifice of cinematic memory and sensory immersion. It posits a world eerily familiar in its ache for oblivion, a reality where the tumultuous landscape of dreams has been largely excised in favor of an extended, perhaps hollow, consciousness. Within this stark bargain, a solitary figure, a wanderer through forbidden states, charts a course across spectral epochs.

This is less a narrative to be followed than an experiential current to be surrendered to, a grand, melancholic waltz through the very apparatus of cinema and the raw data of sensation itself. The journey beckons into an intricate, sometimes bewildering, exploration of what it means to see, to feel, to remember through the flickering light of projected illusion.

The Long Sleep of Reason, The Brief Fever of Dreams

The foundational premise of “Resurrection” whispers of a profound, perhaps Faustian, societal pact: an endless, unruffled existence purchased at the cost of nocturnal phantasms, those chaotic wellsprings of terror and desire. Against this backdrop of elective amnesia, the dreamer—the “Fantasmer,” though the label hardly captures the existential weight—emerges as a figure of quiet defiance.

Embodied by Jackson Yee with a chameleon’s grace, this being drifts, a recurring echo through disparate identities and dissolving eras, a testament to the stubborn persistence of the inner life. An enigmatic counterpart, Shu Qi’s spectral presence, seems to both pursue and shepherd this soul through perilous and beautiful imagined territories.

Their dance propels a flight not merely across fabricated histories but deep into the irrepressible human hunger for the vivid, if ephemeral, territories of the dream. Here lies the film’s aching core: the stark dichotomy between the allure of a passionless, unceasing continuity and the exquisite, burning brevity of a life lived in the shadow of its own intense, fleeting perceptions.

Shards of Celluloid, Whispers of Sensation

The very structure of “Resurrection” mirrors the fractured nature of memory, its episodic unfolding like a collection of shards from cinema’s shattered mirror. Each segment is a distinct exploration, a stylistic séance summoning the ghosts of filmmaking past.

These homages are not sterile imitations but rather reanimations, breathing a strange new life into the aesthetics of bygone eras—the stark, performative horror of early silent film, its shadows pregnant with nascent dread; the labyrinthine paranoia of film noir, where every reflection is a potential accuser; the earthy fatalism of folk legends; the raw, exposed nerve of 1990s independent cinema.

This stylistic pilgrimage is intricately bound to the human sensorium. Consider the initial immersion: a world rendered through the monstrous gaze of nascent cinema, where sight itself becomes an act of grotesque creation, and the dreamer is an icon born of stark light and profound shadow, a purely visual being. Later, sound might become a weapon in a shadowy chronicle of accusation and pursuit, each footfall an echo in a chamber of guilt, or the subtle trace of scent might unlock a narrative of cunning and ephemeral connection, the decaying perfume of deceit or desire.

The dreamer’s constant metamorphosis, shifting identities as one might shed old skins, speaks to the terrifying fluidity of self when unmoored from conventional reality. From this intricate, often disorienting, multiplicity arises a profound richness, a chorus of cinematic specters whispering of the many lives contained within one.

The Architecture of Illusion, The Mechanics of Being

The technical artistry of “Resurrection” serves as the very grammar of its philosophical inquiry. The production design conjures each distinct historical and oneiric space with meticulous care, from opulent, almost suffocating interiors to rain-slicked, neon-haunted cityscapes—stages for recurring human dramas of loss and fleeting connection.

Dong Jingsong’s cinematography moves with the restless, fluid grace of a disembodied consciousness, its hypnotic glides and sudden, piercing gazes mirroring the disorienting yet captivating logic of the dream state. Bi Gan’s signature employment of ambitious, extended single takes transcends mere technical bravura; these unbroken passages become durational experiences, compelling a confrontation with the raw passage of time, the sensation of being suspended within a continuous, subjective present.

The musical score, reportedly a chameleonic entity from M83, washes over these sequences, amplifying the shifting emotional temperatures, underscoring the journey through a landscape of intense, often melancholic, feeling. These elements are not ornamental; they are the sinew and bone of the film’s argument, crafting a world that feels at once hyper-real in its tangible detail and profoundly ethereal, a testament to cinema’s uncanny power to construct and deconstruct our sense of reality itself.

The Persistence of Specters, The Questions Unasked

“Resurrection” ultimately resonates as a profound dialogue with the spectral history of cinema, at once a reverent mausoleum and a cradle for new, unsettling forms. It contemplates time not as a linear progression but as a fractured, subjective vortex, each moment slipping through the dreamer’s grasp like quicksilver.

The film suggests that memory and illusion are the twin architects of our fragile sense of self, a construct perpetually rebuilt on the shifting sands of experience and perception. There is an implicit sorrow here, a quiet lament for, or perhaps a defiant embrace of, the artistic impulse—the compulsion to dream, to create, to feel intensely—in an age that often seems to champion a blander, more mediated form of existence.

The lasting impression is not one of answers, but of a vast, contemplative space, an invitation to wander the haunted corridors of these cinematic lives and ponder our own intricate dance with the stories that shape us, the imagined worlds that offer both refuge and a stark reflection of our deepest anxieties.

Resurrection premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival on May 22, 2025, where it was nominated for the Palme d’Or. The film is expected to be theatrically released in China in the second half of 2025 or by early 2026.

Full Credits

Director: Bi Gan

Writers: Bi Gan, Zhai Xiaohui

Producers: Shan Zuolong, Yang Lele, Charles Gillibert

Cast: Jackson Yee, Shu Qi, Mark Chao, Li Gengxi, Huang Jue, Chen Yongzhong, Zhang Zhijian, Chloe Maayan, Yan Nan, Guo Mucheng

Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Dong Jingsong

Editors: Bi Gan, Bai Xue

Composer: M83