Resurrection

UK Release Date. 13 March 2026
Certification. 15
Running Time. 2 hours 40 mins
Director. Bi Gan
Cast. Mark Chao, Mucheng Guo, Gengxi Li, Shu Qi, Jackson Yee.
Rating. 58%

Review.

A week after a screening of Bi Gan’s Resurrection, and I’m still processing the film. Digesting and cogitating the content. The Chinese director's third feature-length film is an anthology - a six-part love letter to cinema, or more specifically, the evolution of cinematography, loosely wrapped in a premise bore from science fiction. 

Set in a futuristic dreamscape, in a society where people gain immortality by no longer dreaming, a small subset of individuals still dream, preferring to still revel in ethereal fantasies even though this significantly shortens their lifespans. In Resurrection, we follow the last moments before the death of one dissident dreamer, a so-called Deliriant, as he travels through five dream worlds, spanning a century in his mind and each representing a period in cinema. 

Every lead protagonist in these short stories is played by Jackson Yee - a former member of the boy band TFBoys and a major star in China. The vignettes are as follows,

• The most spellbinding one comes first. Shu Qi plays the woman who wakes the Deliriant and sends him on his oneiric odyssey. She locates him in what appears to be a 1920s-style opium den, but soon transforms into a byzantine maze of exaggerated, crooked film-set backdrops. Evoking memories of both F. W. Murnau and Georges Méliès, the accomplished production design by Liu Qiang is mesmeric.
• From here, the narrative jumps forward a few decades, and the Deliriant is respawned as the murder suspect (in possession of a mysterious suitcase) in a 1940s film noir.
• The third dream is a folktale where Yee plays Mongrel, a wretched thief trapped in a dilapidated Buddhist temple, with an excruciatingly painful toothache, who is visited by the spirit of his dead father (Yongzhong Chen).
• Next, Yee plays Jia, a con artist who recruits a young orphan (Mucheng Guo) as his accomplice in a plot to steal money from an ageing gangster (Zhijian Zhang).
• The final dream is a supernatural romance between the Deliriant as Apollo, respendent with bleached blonde hair, and a bewitching young woman, Tai Zhaomei (Gengxi Li), that seemingly unfolds on the eve of the millennium in narrow, neon-lit, rain-drenched alleyways.

The opening sequence - Gan’s tribute to silent melodrama - heavily reflects F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu through a series of Dutch angles and German Expressionist scenery. But each of the Deliriant's dreams relies on a variety of sources and inspirations - and a blurring of tones and textures. Part of my enjoyment was recognising what they are. There were references to Charlie Chaplin's The Kid (1921), F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), Jean Cocteau's La Belle Et La Bête (1946), Orson Welles' The Lady From Shanghai (1947), Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960), François Truffaut's Jules Et Jim (1962), Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon (1973), Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys (1987), Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995), Kar-Wai Wong's In The Mood For Love (2000) and Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011). I'm sure there are many others besides.

The director's first two films gained attention for the remarkable extended long takes, and it is no surprise to see him return to the format for a third time. In an astonishing 40-minute sequence, Gan moves from harbour to street to millennium party in a club and back, shifting perspective from third-person to first-person and back, incorporating song, dance, and violence, and somehow manages to end on a perfect angle of a sunrise from the deck of a moving boat. It is a tour-de-force single take; one that apparently took almost 30 six-hour takes - one a night for a month - to perfect. 

There is no denying Resurrection is imaginative, inventive, boundary-defying cinema. The film looks sensational, thanks to its opulent production design and photography. Gan's command of shadow and light is exceptional. The film sounds wonderfully evocative thanks to M83’s deeply cinematic musical score. The issue is that Resurrection is a test of endurance. At times, the narrative is impenetrable, and through a demanding runtime that spans 2 hours and 40 minutes, the experience is somewhat draining. Resurrection demands your complete attention while working to earn every second of it. 

Patience is required. The more I tried to make sense of it all, the more Resurrection frustrated me. Perhaps this is a piece of work into which one needs to relax? Approach in a dream-like state?  

Bi Gan's ambition is overpowering. But for all the director's waxing lyrical about the need for humanity to keep dreaming through cinema and his technically impressive tributes to film history, the film offers a minimal sense of soul beneath the surface. In short, Resurrection is an episodic film with too many episodes.

Resurrection will not be to everyone's taste [I'm not sure it was to mine], but I must confess it is simply unlike anything else being made right now. So much so, I was convinced to attend a subsequent screening of Bi Gan's second film - Long Day’s Journey Into Night - a couple of days later.