RESURRECTION (Bi Gan 2025)

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Bi Gan's third film is a glorious operatic vampire dream and history of cinema

In a future where humanity has surrendered its ability to dream in exchange for immortality, an outcast (Jackson Yee) finds illusion, nightmarish visions, and beauty in an intoxicating world of his own making. Warning: in the first half hour this film has a disturbing sequence of a man hung upside down and being mercilessly beaten. Metacritic: 87% ("Universal Acclaim"). See my reviews of earlier Bi Gan, starting here: A Short Story (2022). See the discussion of Resurrection in Asian Movie Pulse.

Beginning with an audience in a theater looking back on us as if we are sitting in the room with them before becoming something closer to a silent film then hurtling both through time and genre, Resurrection is organized into six parts that span a hundred years, each part reviewing a segment of cinema history and dominated by a different one of the senses (as specified by Buddhism; and this is a film that refers to Buddhist thought): sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and mind (or hallucinatory). The smell part stands out the most: in it a little girl learns to identify playing cards by their odor.

All this, glorious as it is, is hard to take in at once. It's partly about cinema as the equivalent of dreaming, or of being forbidden to dream making one devour movies as the equivalent. It reminded me of a childhood cinema dream experience: my first viewing (or two) of Powell and Pressberger's splendid 1951 color-and-sound-drenched operatic recreation, Tales of Hoffman.. The great pleasure of a movie like this, at least in early viewings, is not in understanding it but getting lost in it.

If we are to pin it down, and it's really better not to, Resurrection is an epic science fiction drama set in a future where humanity has been forced en masse to give up dreaming, but some, including its lead character the "Delerant" (Jackson Yee) chooses to dream, and in so doing relives a century through the course of four dreams, aided by a woman (Shu Qi) using, surprisingly, the lost techniques of cinema.

Jackson Lee is now Jaeger-LeCoultre's Global Ambassador, so yes, he's officially glamorous. And he's the concluding boy-star, bitten by choice by a beautiful forever-young vampire. Each of the six segments of the film, as mentioned, corresponds to one of the six senses recognized in Buddhist thought. And that may make this not just a feast for the eyes, but food for thought as well. However, the buzz about it still seemed to be that it was mostly a beautiful puzzler; not sure if that has changed or is going to.

Resurrection 狂野时代 (Chinese for "Wild Time/Era/Age"), 160 mins., premiered in Competition at Cannes where it won the jury special prize. It was included in dozens of international festivals including Karlovy Vary, Busan, New York, London, Bangkok, Vienna, and São Paulo. It was released in mainland China on Nov. 22, 2025 and in the US (limited) Dec. 12. This review is prompted by the Criterion Channel digital streaming release Mar. 24, 2026. Metacritic rating: 87%.