Resurrection Review: To Sleep, Perchance to Make Movies

It’s been said that a film is merely a dream captured in celluloid, and if so then the nighttime visions that dance through the head of Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan must be too vibrant to contain within one man. They have spilled out into the worlds of Resurrection, a cavalcade of strange images that take the language of cinema into his sleeping fantasies and bring it back more vibrant than ever.

The cosmology of Resurrection is spelled out through a series of title cards that explain how humanity had reached a form of immortality – by sacrificing the ability to dream. Those that have retained their inner fantastical life are known as Deliriants, and it’s up to the Other Ones, like the Big Other (Shu Qi), to track them down. Her latest target is an opium addict (Jackson Yee) with a series of physical afflictions, from kyphosis to extreme scarring, for whom dreams have become a better life than that the “real” world can offer.

When Big Other finally tracks him down, she grants him the mercy of death through his dreams, but with one addendum: She inserts a projector into him so that she too can witness his final unreal moments.

There’s a kindness to her action, but also an element of voyeurism. It’s as if the director of 2018’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night is acknowledging an unspoken truth of cinema: that audiences are piggybacking on the dreams of filmmakers, and that the storytellers are exposing something of themselves. It’s nothing so mundane as their outer selves, but some form of aspiration, or escape. The Deliriant becomes other people – an accused murderer in a mid-century noir, an art thief, a street hoodlum with a vampire lover – and Big Other gets to witness that which she can never experience.

What truly enthralls the viewer is Bi Gan’s journey through the history of cinema. At the most simplistic level, each segment reflects an era or geography of moviemaking, from the European silent era to contemporary Asian gangster flicks, through distinctive color grading and aspect ratio selections. Yet Bi Gan strives for something deeper and richer, like he’s sharing the dreams of those filmmakers that came before him. It’s easy to see not just vague homages, but purposeful channeling of Georges Méliès, Park Chan-wook, Stan Brakhage, Wong Kar-wai, Douglas Sirk, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Victor Fleming, Jia Zhangke, and a thousand others. Yet Bi Gan’s voice is always there, each frame stylized and memorable, each fantasy distinct yet unified.

Much of that continuity comes from the binding performance of Yee, who floats through each story and reshapes himself to the world the dreamer has created. No longer contained or limited by his deformities, the Deliriant can be whoever he wants, even if those stories he inhabits are just other kinds of tragedies, and ultimately as ephemeral and transitory as melting wax. These dreams are, of course, abstract and strange in places, circling through the mists of creativity and imagination as the Deliriant shapes their worlds and everyone within them. As he tells a creation within one of his dreams, “I belong only to myself.” In that moment, Bi Gan may be speaking most directly to the audience. He may belong only to himself, but his gift of sharing his dreams through this work of cinema is clear and kind.

Resurrection opens at AFS Cinema on January 1.

This article appears in January 2 • 2026.