‘Resurrection’ Review: Bi Gan’s Dreamlike Journey Through the History of Cinema (Criterion Channel)
This film by the Chinese director unfolds in multiple segments that pay tribute to different styles from across 20th-century cinema.
There’s something slightly unfair—perhaps even reductive—about the conditions under which films like Resurrection are often encountered. After years of meticulous work by Bi Gan and his collaborators, the film demands a level of attention and sensitivity that few viewing contexts can fully accommodate. Its slow, subtle, and enigmatic rhythms require a clarity of mind that modern streaming habits rarely allow. And yet—and this is part of its quiet miracle—the film still manages to captivate, seduce, and even surprise despite those challenges.
The film unfolds as a tribute to the history of cinema, divided into six episodes that are both stylistically and chronologically distinct. At the same time, one could just as easily imagine that Bi Gan conceived the overarching structure retroactively, as a way of binding together a series of ideas for shorter works. Whatever the origin, Resurrection moves through segments that range roughly from 20 to 40 minutes, loosely threading together a narrative that resonates far more on a sensory than a strictly storytelling level.
A somewhat cryptic title card that opens the first episode—shot in the style of silent cinema—suggests that, in the future, humanity will split into two groups: those who live forever but cannot dream, and those who dream but must die. The film’s narrator claims the task of resurrecting the latter, allowing them to return in new bodies, new lives, stripped of memory. Or something like that. The idea operates less as plot than as metaphor, tying into cinema itself as the great dream-producing machine of the 20th century—a history the film revisits in fragments.
In the first episode, we meet a “Fantasmer”—the name of those who choose death over a dreamless eternity—a creature straight out of silent-era nightmares, somewhere between Frankenstein and Nosferatu, inhabiting a world built with the visual grammar of German Expressionism. Played across all episodes by an almost unrecognizable Jackson Yee, the figure is pursued by one of these “resurrectors.” While Shu Qi provides the voiceover, she does not embody most of the central female roles, adding another layer of disjunction to the film’s shifting identities.
The second episode moves into the terrain of 1930s and ’40s espionage films and film noir. Here, the reborn Fantasmer—now with no recollection of his past—is accused of murdering a powerful man. As with most segments, the narrative is deliberately opaque, at times even difficult to follow, but Bi Gan compensates by directing attention toward visual detail and cinephilic homage, including a striking nod to The Lady from Shanghai.
A subsequent segment evokes the ’50s or ’60s, shifting into a more classical mode of Chinese provincial drama, somewhere between gangster storytelling and rural portraiture. By the time the film reaches what feels like the ’80s, its aesthetic adjusts accordingly: the protagonist becomes the father of a young girl who performs magic tricks while skimming money from dangerous, powerful figures.
The fifth—and longest—episode is a single, elaborate tracking shot, a signature move for Bi Gan. Set in 1999, it follows a rebellious young man as he escapes with a girl he loves, played by Li Gengxi. The sequence carries echoes of Wong Kar-wai and even recalls the structure of Three Times, which also starred Shu Qi. Over the course of more than 40 mesmerizing minutes, the film drifts through parties, fights, karaoke bars, and an atmosphere of constant, underlying danger. A shorter coda returns the film to its initial terrain: cinema as both dream factory and storytelling apparatus.
At times, Resurrection can be narratively demanding, even opaque to the point of frustration. But its primary ambition lies elsewhere. Rather than inviting viewers to piece together a coherent plot, Bi Gan uses these fragments as conduits for a journey across cinematic forms, styles, and eras. In doing so, he demonstrates a remarkable command over each register he explores, while remaining acutely aware that his approach exists in stark opposition to the aesthetics of contemporary streaming culture.
His film insists on cinema reflecting on itself—even as that very medium feels increasingly fragile. Screens fade, audiences dwindle, and what remains are ghosts: of images, of stories, of the dreams that once filled them. In a devastating final shot, Bi Gan distills his meditation on cinema, memory, and time into something deeply unsettling—suggesting that everything erodes, everything disappears, and all that’s left is the faint hope that resurrection, in some form, might still be possible.
