Resurrection (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Jiwei Xiao

Produced by Charles Gillibert, Yang Lele, Shan Zuolong; written and directed by Bi Gan; cinematography by Dong Jingsong; edited by Bi Gan; production design by Liu Qiang; music by M83; starring Jackson Yee, Shu Qi, Mark Chao, Li Gengxi, Huang Jue, Chen Yongzhong, Yan Nan, Zhang Zhijian, and Guo Mucheng. Color. Mandarin dialogue with English subtitles, 160 min., 2025. A Janus Films release.

How remarkable that two of the most outstanding films of 2025, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent and Bi Gan’s Resurrection, should each, at the climax, feature a window-side mise en scène of breathtaking beauty and astonishing sophistication. In the scene in The Secret Agent, Armando (Wagner Moura) must confront his past, his current crisis, and his imminent future as a political exile. As he talks to his father-in-law, a projectionist at Cinema São Luiz, about his relationship with their beloved, now deceased, Fátima (Alice Carvalho), Armando walks toward a large open window in the room and looks out. A tracking shot follows his gaze, revealing a panoramic view of Recife. The window overlooking the night-falling city remains visible whenever Armando appears on the screen in his ensuing conversation with Elza (Maria Fernanda Cândido), the leader of the underground movement. The viewer is constantly aware of the breeze from outside the window that softly ruffles the curtains and Elza’s hair. So serene, yet so alive, the mise en scène—capturing the temporal-spatial flow—lets us intuit Armando’s elusive, vacillating consciousness, caught in a storm of unsettling information, plans, and memories.

In Bi Gan’s film, the window is first shattered and then crossed toward the end of an extended take that encompasses the entire fifth episode. Before following the two main characters to brave the liminal frame, the camera tracks forward toward the window. Outside, a crowd of people congregate and disperse—in accelerating speed—in front of an open-air projection of Louis Lumière’s L’Arroseur arrosé (1895). The screen showing the iconic film lights up and fades like a phantom statue on a late-night plaza. If the frame-beyond-frame composition here shows a chasm in its layering of distinct cinematic moments across time and space, the stunning through-the-window track-out shot and the characters’ implied leap forward—all taking place within the long take—transcend the abyme. Thus, serving as a portal between the vampiric realm of darkness and chaos and the Apollonian world of light and freedom, the window also anchors Bi Gan’s “mise-en-scène of transformation” as a temporal threshold, evoking an uncanny convergence of past, present, and future.

Like Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, Bi Gan’s Resurrection demonstrates the vitality of international cinema and its enduring power as an evolving art form. In her New York Times review, Manohla Dargis calls Resurrection “a glorious and hugely ambitious work,” linking its inventiveness to the continual transformation and mutation of cinema as a whole. More than a eulogy that memorializes a century of film history, Resurrection holds out a torch of leaping, incandescent flames to illuminate a new path for cinema’s becoming, for its potential yet to be discovered.

At the age of twenty-six, Bi Gan made his debut feature Kaili Blues (2015), a dream-infused low-budget film with hypnotic tracking shots and enigmatic, poetic flourishes that astonished cinephiles and critics worldwide. His sophomore feature, Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018), became an instant phenomenon on the international festival circuit. Resurrection appears after a seven-year hiatus and won the 2025 Cannes Special Prize. In this new film Bi follows the winding path of Long Day’s Journey into Night, but goes much further. The opening title cards set up the story: in a future where humanity forsakes dreaming in exchange for immortality, an outcast called Deliriant prefers dreams to eternal life. A mysterious Other One discerns Deliriant’s illusions and is determined to probe the depths of his dreams and grant him a slow, gentle death. The Other One, played by Shu Qi—a longtime leading actress in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s cinema and, with Girl (2025), now a director in her own right—is a “woman with a movie camera.” She installs a projector inside Deliriant the “dream monster,” setting into motion the film’s one-hundred-year transmigration.

Resurrection is a sensuous six-chapter ciné-novel, with each chapter centered on a human sense—sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, and consciousness. It assumes an epic scope as Deliriant traverses shifting historical periods of the twentieth century in four incarnations, all played by Chinese pop idol Jackson Yee: Qiu, an “homme fatale” who assassinated two men attracted to him in the Forties noir (autumn) chapter; a young monk called Mongrel, who previously murdered his father with poisonous potatoes—an act he accidentally repeats, killing himself and his father’s doppelgänger Bitter Demon (Chen Yongzhong) in the Sixties (winter) episode; a con artist who trains an orphan to swindle a wealthy “red aristocrat” smelling of formalin in the Eighties (spring) segment; and, finally, a young hood who wields a gun fiercely but then easily surrenders to the charms of a vampire in the Y2K (summer) segment.¹ Deliriant undergoes multiple deaths and “rebirths,” yet he is neither a hero nor a savior.

Despite this sci-fi premise placed within a retrospective framework, Resurrection is neither fully futuristic nor historical. Bi Gan abandoned a planned sci-fi ending, creating a film that is most mesmerizing when it swings uncertainly between the obscure and the illuminating. Dream—both material and master motif of transience and transformation—shapes the film’s look and logic, privileging poetic and allegorical signification over storytelling and characterization. By turns hallucinatory, noirish, comedic, ghostly, melodramatic, and romantic, the two-hour-and-forty-minute film takes us deeper into one dream, then another, and another. Like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, we descend into Bi Gan’s “land of wonders, wild and new.”

But the oneiric focus—also defining Bi’s previous two features—shifts away from dream as an everyday experience and a repository of private reveries toward phantasmagoric instability and shimmering effects that evoke early cinematic surrealism. The opium den offers a beguilingly appropriate starting point for a film whose protagonist is called Deliriant (derived from delirium), who feeds on opium poppies and whose tears provide the nectar for its pleasure-seeking customers. The dollhouse-like set is an animated oriental curio box and a surrealist installation in one. As soon as Ms. Shu tiptoes into the vaulted house, the viewer’s eye is overwhelmed by a simultaneous unfolding of various activities across the multitiered, multisectional space. Laying out adjoining rooms and rendering private activities visible within a single planar composition, Bi’s deep-focus mise en scène strikingly recalls the famous apartment sequence in Tati’s Playtime.

And “playtime” it certainly is! In a back chamber, wooden cutouts mechanically emulate fornicating couples, then plunging our gaze into a recess that repeats infinitely—the deep-focus mise en abyme effect is straight out of Citizen Kane. But Bi Gan’s play with tactility and sound in this episode is remarkably original. As she climbs the stairs, Ms. Shu is puzzled by uncanny movements and sounds—all “hand-made”: a hand abruptly dips down from the top edge of a frame, like a puppeteer’s piercing the proscenium, to close a door behind her; a slender woman’s hand suddenly protrudes from the top, tinkling the bells on a hanging lantern high above; and another hand rips away a painted surface, revealing a lower depth into which she is about to descend.

The mischievous foregrounding of artifice, the revealing-and-hiding interplay, appears in other episodes as well. In the noir section, a Theremin, an electronic instrument invented in the Twenties, creates eerie, wavering tones that evoke early cinema, not only linking this Forties episode back to the silent prologue but also introducing the “suitcase” as a McGuffin. The real elusive lure, of course, is Deliriant himself—with the code name “Suitcase”—here appearing as the young, handsome assassin named Qiu. Qiu is the object of desire for the Composer (Yan Nan) and the Commander (Mark Chao), each approaching him with a pretext—the former to hear his voice and the latter to decode his secret. In the Y2K episode the suitcase returns in a karaoke scene. Bi Gan delights in recurring motifs that create whimsical visual echoes and gags, enhancing connections across the episodes. His black suitcases never hide lethal weapons—the bulky Theremin and the slim karaoke microphone in them look like cheeky jokes on noir conventions, as does the handgun that tumbles out of a small, innocent-looking violin case.

As in dreams, objects are fluid, always on the verge of slipping into something else—patterns of flowers and skulls rotate and morph into each other in animated, hypnotic circles; a maid plucks a dangling earring from her ear, tinkling it like a miniature handbell; pipelines running along underground walls metamorphose into staves of a musical score; and BWV 478, referring to the well-known Bach piece, “Come. Sweet death, come blessed rest,” presumably contains the code the Commander attempts to crack.

No imagery is more amorphous than fire. In the opening sequence, a wild, engulfing blaze leaps toward us ferociously but soon dwindles, leaving a hole with an irregular rim that resembles a cigarette burn or the mouth of a cave, or a time-warping telescopic lens through which audiences of the past gaze backward at us, their future successors. Fire flickers across the entire noir episode. Whereas a scene in which the Commander strides over Deliriant the assassin, slashing him open and setting himself ablaze, produces an overstated homoerotic message, the reference to the fire of desire and punishment in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943) is too fleeting and oblique.

A more effective fiery moment captures Bi Gan’s sensitivity to visually and kinetically associated details: a dissolve carries a flaming bush by a lake into an interior shot of a spinning vinyl disc, whose shimmering surface under candlelight not only smoothes the transition, but also creates the illusion of efflorescence. In the dissolve, the wild flame by the lake transforms into a miniature firework blooming from beneath the stylus as it grazes the turntable’s groove. No less strikingly, an apparently unmotivated railway shot in the sequence awakens the viewer’s memory of those scintillating sparks that previously fly from train wheels screeching to a halt—all just before the mad Composer attempts to kill himself and Deliriant.

Resurrection’s eclectic look is influenced by both Chinese aesthetics and international art cinema. Excepting the Buddhist temple, its sets often look more Western than Chinese. Ms. Shu’s glass-roofed studio resembles a turn-of-the-century European photographer’s atelier. The gabled train shed and lakeside scene in the noir episode have touches of Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), the film whose title names both the Y2K episode’s central scene—the night club—and its main theme. Other references to film classics include Méliès’s moon prop and the Lumières’ L’Arroseur arrosé. The noir episode culminates in a vertiginous hall-of-mirrors sequence that pays homage to the fun house shoot-out in The Lady from Shanghai (1947). One can also see dashes of David Lynch and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, while the burning tree and the cathedral-like theatre recall Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986) and Nostalgia (1983).

Deliriant seems a composite of the famous monstrous creatures haunting early films—Nosferatu, Frankenstein, and Quasimodo. His metamorphosis also recalls serial masquerades in Leo Carax’s Holy Motors (2012), a film that also likely inspired Deliriant’s flower devouring and his traversing through manholes as portals. Shu Qi’s silent-cinema-mode performance in Resurrection references Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times (2005). Self-references also are present, in the form of matchboxes and a radio station bearing the name “Dangmai,” the dream village in Kaili Blues and the brand of Bi’s production company. And Deliriant the con artist plays poker tricks in Kaizhen restaurant, a nod to Long Day’s Journey into Night.

One of the film’s most enigmatic episodes is its winter’s tale set in the Sixties. Deliriant is Mongrel, a young monk who occupies a desolate Buddhist temple amid the “Attack on the Four-Olds” fervor of the Cultural Revolution. In a fit of toothache-induced frenzy, he knocks out a rotten tooth and flings it into the air. Instead of the tooth fairy, Bitter Demon descends. The witty, humorous exchanges between the two enliven the film, but things turn eerie as night deepens. An upward camera tilting along a window, accompanied by the peals of a tolling bell and loud snoring of Bitter Demon, transports us into a mysterious dreamscape. In Bitter Demon’s dream, he and Mongrel perform a strange calligraphy exercise: while he uses his index finger to write the character “Sweet” (甘) in a duckweed-covered water basin, Mongrel moves wood boards to install the same character on the snowy ground. A lap dissolve shows the two then writing “Bitterness” (苦)—again in parallel. The cinematized orthographic flip looks playful, mesmerizing.

More mystifying is the story behind it. Mongrel claims that he killed his father with sprouting, poisonous potatoes out of pity—his father had lost all human dignity, debilitated by a rabies-induced illness that made him fearful of wind, water, light, and even sound. The description of these rare symptoms recalls the widely circulated accounts of the disease afflicting hypochondriac Lin Biao. Lin was Chairman Mao’s top military general and designated political successor—before he purportedly schemed a coup against Mao, fled, and died in a plane crash. Bitter Demon notices the sprouting potatoes in the snow yet says nothing when Mongrel consumes the roasted potato. And by episode’s end, only a black dog is seen exiting the temple room. Here, one might ask the same questions fueling the conspiracy theories about Lin’s plane-crash death: Is this the father’s revenge or an accident resulting from the son’s own mistake? Mongrel’s ambiguous bonding with Bitter Demon, who assumes the appearance of his late father, reflects Lin’s quasi-filial relationship with Mao. The film thus offers a furtive, encrypted glimpse into the dark abyss of China’s political past, but only through the coded language of dream and open-ended scenarios.

And how do we read the exhilaration and death that ends the Y2K episode? When fleeing the vampire house, Deliriant, now Apollo, and Tai Zhaomei run hand-in-hand like children in a fairy tale. They embark on a red boat in disbelief—everything they were promised is real: the boat, piano music, and romantic love. Bi’s evocation of youthful hope and joy at the dawn of the new millennium is touching and quietly wrenching. In reality, Chinese millennials are the first generation to have grown up entirely under the country’s opening and reform policy, and subsequent economic rise. Yet they also have struggled with structural changes in housing and demographic shifts, along with cutthroat competition. Bi Gan’s barge-like boat does not sail well, as it may have in Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934). Passion ends up killing the Dream/monster.

Resurrection is Bi Gan’s mirror palace of dreams—at once stately and sensuous, lucid and labyrinthine, an ingenious fusion of baroque grandeur and rococo details. Like some of his film-history predecessors, the director approaches dream as a cinematic Esperanto, believing in its universal appeal. In my short interview with Bi, he emphasized that cinema is a vessel and while it may be a key to open Resurrection’s many rooms, the film is ultimately a story about lonely souls floating “on this land” in the last one hundred years. Indeed, if Resurrection looks like a grand cathedral dedicated to cinema, each of its chapels burns candles for a smaller unit of society in the form of either a (quasi-)familial or a romantic relationship: Ms. Shu and Deliriant look like mother and son; the Sixties episode is a story about a son, a dead father, and his spiritual agent; the Eighties episode foregrounds a father-daughter-like pairing in addition to two severed father-daughter relationships in the backdrop; and finally, the noir episode and the vampire story both feature lovers killed in romantic passion. Toward the epilogue’s end, Ms. Shu opens a gate embedded in a luminous wall in order to deliver Deliriant’s body to infinity. The tiny niches, each holding a light, resemble the compartments of a columbarium. Deliriant and his many incarnations, adrift through the century, are orphans of history.

The thirty-six-year-old director is a dreamer and a puzzle-maker. His “old soul” resides not just in Deliriant, his dream/movie monster, but also in Resurrection’s youngest character, the Smart Girl (Guo Mucheng), who is quick with many riddles yet stumped by one left unsolved by the father who abandoned her: “What is this thing lost from a person that can never be recovered? “Fart” is Bi’s joke, while “conscience” is an answer rejected by the girl. What about “love” or even “dream”—too obvious and earnest? But another riddle is barely hidden beneath Resurrection’s ethereal beauty, magical moments, daft jokes, and poetically conceived dream sequences: what is this thing that can be killed, but not annihilated? Bi Gan’s film offers a simple, if convoluted, answer: dream—or inner freedom uncontrolled and ultimately uncontrollable. It will rise and be resurrected, again and again.

¹ “Qiu” is a homophone of “Autumn,” suggesting the seasonal-cycle-structuring of the four episodes. The historical timeline was clearer in the festival screenings I saw than in the theatrical release, which uses only phrases like “twenty years later” to indicate the passage of time.

Jiwei Xiao is Professor of Cinema Studies in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Fairfield University.

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Cineaste, Vol. LI, No. 2