‘Resurrection’ movie review: Bi Gan’s ouroborosian odyssey through cinema is unlike anything else this decade |

Every cinephile eventually acquires one unreleased film that gradually metastasises from giddy anticipation into their entire personality. Long before I watched Bi Gan’s Resurrection, I had already become insufferable enough about finally getting to watch it for the people around me to start rooting against my quest out of sheer self-preservation.

Ever since it premiered in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it emerged with the Prix Spécial and immediately triggered a cycle of critics attempting to explain that they had witnessed either the future of cinema or two and a half hours of beautifully organised delirium, I became spectacularly unbearable to everyone within conversational distance. Every Indian film festival announcement soon turned into an exercise in self-inflicted optimism. Surely somebody, somewhere, would smuggle one of the year’s most feverishly anticipated works onto a screen within travelling distance? And surprisingly enough, they did. But as fate would have it, my ability to miss every conceivable screening was undefeated. Now, nearly a year since its premiere, Resurrection has finally surfaced on Prime Video, bringing one of my longest-running acts of cinematic yearning to a decidedly less glamorous, but no less welcome, conclusion.

All that anticipation exists for good reason, of course, because Bi Gan has assembled one of the most singular bodies of work in contemporary world cinema. The thirty-six-year-old filmmaker from China’s Guizhou province first announced himself through Kaili Blues in 2015, a debut that folded memory and geography into a dreamy, forty-minute travelling shot. Three years later, Long Day’s Journey Into Night expanded those ambitions into an even grander formal experiment, famously shifting into an hour-long stereoscopic take that dissolved distinctions between recollection, fantasy and physical reality with an audacity that placed Bi alongside filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Resurrection represents the logical culmination of those interests because it imagines the act of dreaming as cinema’s primary biological function.

That premise sounds intimidating when reduced to synopsis, but rest assured, Bi Gan still presents it with subtlety before disappearing into abstraction. In the film, humanity has discovered the secret to immortality by abandoning dreams altogether, exchanging imagination for indefinite existence. A handful of dissidents, however, continue to dream despite knowing every dream consumes their lifespan, becoming hunted figures called Deliriants whose continued existence threatens the order of this supposedly perfected civilisation. Jackson Yee plays one such Deliriant, introduced beneath layers of German Expressionist monster prosthesis, carrying an entire projector embedded inside his body. Shu Qi appears opposite him as a mysterious woman tasked with retrieving him from his dream state, but compassion gradually replaces obligation when she discovers that allowing him one final journey through memory constitutes the only merciful death available.

What follows divides itself into six movements organised around the six senses recognised within Buddhist philosophy: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch and finally mind, with each chapter adopting the cinematic vocabulary of a different historical period while following the Deliriant through another incarnation across a century of imagined lives. Bi Gan could easily have allowed this conceit to collapse into a cinephilic scavenger hunt, but he recruits cinematographer Dong Jingsong, production designers Liu Qiang and Tu Nan, editor Qin Yanan and the French electronic group M83 to construct something considerably more beguiling. Just when you think you’ve reverse-engineered how a particular sequence could exist, Bi Gan casually burns the blueprint and moves on to another impossibility. Watching it eventually became an exercise in accepting that he clearly has access to a version of filmmaking the rest of the industry simply hasn’t unlocked yet.

The opening movement embraces silent cinema with astonishing fidelity as the Deliriant lurks inside an opium den-like, forgotten studio backlot. Intertitles replace spoken dialogue, paper-cut silhouettes wander through deliberately artificial sets, stop-motion transitions interrupt physical continuity, reverse photography bends movement into uncanny rhythms, and exaggerated painted shadows recall The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Every visible trick — whether it’s stagehands casually trespassing into the frame or painted backdrops gliding into place — reminds us that cinema has always been an elaborate game of confidence, carrying forward Georges Méliès’ delight in convincing audiences to admire the mechanics as much as the miracle.

The fascination with material filmmaking also establishes the emotional core of the feature. The Deliriant survives because cinema survives. Every reel projected through the mechanism hidden in his back extends another fragment of existence while simultaneously exhausting his remaining life, transforming film stock into both bloodstream and countdown clock. The metaphor carries obvious melancholy at a historical moment where theatrical exhibition continues resisting streaming economics and collapsing attention spans, yet Bi Gan never descends into nostalgic sermonising.

The first dream abruptly tears open that handcrafted dream and deposits the Deliriant inside a wartime espionage narrative centred around hearing, where a bombed railway station disappears beneath dense blue-grey fog. Bi widens the aspect ratio, abandons silent formalism, introduces spoken dialogue and fills the music with mechanical echoes, distant explosions and ringing tinnitus. Yee transforms accordingly, shedding the grotesque prosthetics for the first of several entirely distinct physical performances. The sequence feels like a collision between postwar noir and espionage melodrama, although its emotional engine is still startlingly intimate.

The second dream contracts both its scale and its tempo, as the Deliriant reappears as a former monk who escorts looters through an abandoned Buddhist monastery before discovering they have inadvertently stranded him there overnight. Taste governs the chapter through the monk’s relentless toothache, whose eventual extraction releases the Spirit of Bitterness in the familiar form of his dead father. Dong Jingsong drains the image into icy monochrome, covering the monastery in an oppressive whiteness that seems to channel the spiritual austerity of Béla Tarr. The sound design grows remarkably sparse, reducing entire stretches to footsteps across snow, distant wind and the grinding discomfort of the monk’s aching jaw. By allowing the monk’s extracted tooth to summon the image of his father, Bi Gan turns physical suffering into the mechanism through which memory returns. 

The third dream pivots toward smell and is at once the film’s warmest yet most crushing chapter. Here, Bi Gan explores the grubby professionalism of a small-time con artist. Yee reappears as Jia, a hustler who recruits an orphaned girl into an elaborate confidence trick that involves identifying playing cards through scent in order to convince a grieving crime boss that she possesses supernatural abilities. The premise has the bones of classic caper cinema, recalling the melancholy street wisdom of Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon filtered through the fatalism of Chinese gangster melodrama. The orphan continues searching for the meaning behind a riddle her absent father left scribbled onto a banknote, while the ageing mob boss desperately hopes somebody can recover the contents of a letter destroyed in the fire that killed his estranged daughter. Dong Jingsong photographs these spaces with richer colour saturation than the earlier chapters, and M83’s score also becomes gentler, with soothing piano motifs and restrained electronic textures coexisting with long stretches of diegetic silence. Long enchanted by cinema’s ability to manufacture belief through sleight of hand, Bi Gan redirects that fascination here toward the psychology of spectatorship. 

The fourth and final dream takes place on New Year’s Eve 1999 inside a rain-lashed port city whose docks and back alleys glow beneath an ocean of saturated crimson, through one of the most breathtaking oners committed to digital cinema in recent memory. Yee returns as Apollo, an impulsive young hoodlum whose greatest source of embarrassment stems from never having kissed anyone. An aimless evening introduces him to Tai Zhaomei, played by Li Gengxi with an intoxicating blend of melancholy and playful mystery, whose dependence on a local crime lord gradually reveals itself as something very literal — she is a vampire kept alive by the blood he supplies in exchange for possession of the soil from her grave. 

Despite its extraordinary logistical complexity, the camera moves with remarkable emotional intelligence, abandoning the rigid choreography that has come to define so many digitally stitched prestige oners of late, in favour of something curious and genuinely improvisational. It slips beside Apollo before wandering away from him, lingers on strangers, momentarily borrows his perspective, glides through packed karaoke rooms erupting into gunfire, drifts across warehouses and deserted docks, then gently boards a boat as dawn begins dissolving the darkness behind the city. Every creative department operates with breathtaking precision throughout this movement, from the constantly shifting choreography and hidden lighting cues to the production design that turns wet asphalt into a canvas for fractured neon reflections, while M83’s euphoric score steadily gathers momentum alongside time-lapse photography that carries the night towards the first sunrise of the new millennium. When Apollo offers Tai his own blood before they finally kiss on the departing boat, the chapter locates romance inside an act of voluntary sacrifice that feels inseparable from Bi Gan’s larger conviction that cinema itself continues to survive because generation after generation willingly gives part of itself to the people who come after.

Since Kaili Blues, Bi Gan has steadily expanded the formal vocabulary of his cinema through recurring preoccupations with dreams, memory and the elasticity of time, but through Resurrection he finally reveals that those ideas have only functioned as pathways towards a larger question concerning cinema itself and its extraordinary capacity for perpetual reinvention. But all of it feels remarkably free of the preservationist anxiety that burdens so many contemporary works about cinema. He imagines cinema as a living ouroboros whose continued survival depends upon endless acts of self-consumption, until authorship itself becomes an accumulation of everything the medium has already lived through. Resurrection galvanises the feeling of witnessing film history continuously digest itself to discover another future, and that ultimately comes from the conviction that very few modern filmmakers appear to love cinema with Bi Gan’s extraordinary thoroughness. 

At a moment when cinema seems perpetually preoccupied with its own mortality, few films have made a more exhilarating argument for its immortality, and I struggle to think of any as unforgettable as Resurrection.

Resurrection is currently streaming on Prime Video

Published – July 07, 2026 09:44 pm IST