Bi Gan’s Resurrection knows it loves cinema. It does not know what that love has cost it.
| Director | Bi Gan |
|---|---|
| Year | 2025 |
| Runtime | 148 minutes |
| Cast | Jackson Yee, Shu Qi |
| Award | Prix Spécial, Cannes Film Festival 2025 |
| Streaming | Criterion Channel (2026) |
“He has built a cathedral to the religion of cinematic surrender and then installed floodlights everywhere. You can admire every stone. You cannot pray.”
Let me tell you what Bi Gan has done here, because it took me a couple of days after watching to fully understand it.
He has made a film about the sacred experience of losing yourself inside a movie. He has poured everything into it: seven years of work, five distinct visual styles, a 30-minute single take that required two weeks of nightly shooting, sequences of such hallucinatory beauty that you genuinely question whether what you are seeing is possible. And then, without realising it, he has made a film that you cannot lose yourself inside. Not for a single moment.
That is not a small irony. That is the whole story.
Resurrection arrives as Bi Gan’s third feature, and already the scale is staggering. His debut, Kaili Blues (2015), felt like a secret: intimate, strange, saturated with the specific textures of Guizhou province in southern China where he grew up. His second film, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018), pushed further into dreamlike territory and ended with a celebrated one-hour 3D long take that played in Chinese cinemas as a genuine event. People bought tickets just for the second half. Now comes Resurrection, which won the Prix Spécial at Cannes 2025, and which feels less like a third film than like a filmmaker swallowing the entire history of cinema whole and trying to breathe it back out.
Here is the premise, though calling it a premise almost undersells it. In a future where humanity has traded the ability to dream in exchange for immortality, a dying creature called a Deliriant, played by Jackson Yee across five different incarnations, hides inside a sequence of dreams to keep living. Each dream is a different era of cinema: silent expressionism, film noir, melodrama, something close to a religious parable, and finally a vampiric long-take set on a rain-soaked New Year’s Eve in 1999. A woman played by Shu Qi hunts him across all of it. Whether she wants to catch him, save him, or simply be near him, the film wisely refuses to say.
Bi Gan is not telling you a story so much as he is taking you by the hand and walking you through a museum he built himself. Every room is different. Every room is extraordinary. And you never once forget you are in a museum.
This is where things get interesting.
The film’s entire soul rests on the belief that surrender to cinema is one of the most essentially human things we can do. The Deliriant is hunted precisely because he cannot stop surrendering to images. He is a dreamer in a world that has decided dreaming is dangerous, and the film loves him for it with an almost parental devotion. Bi Gan is clearly telling us something he believes with his whole chest: that the willingness to fall completely into a moving image, to let it do things to you before your brain catches up, is sacred. And it is disappearing.
But here is what he has not noticed. Resurrection is one of the most technically self-conscious films made in years. From the first frame, it is announcing itself. Watch what I can do with silent film grammar. Watch what I can do with noir shadow. Watch this long take. Watch this. Every section arrives like a magician changing costumes on stage, and you do watch, you watch with genuine, open-mouthed astonishment, but astonishment is not surrender. Astonishment keeps you at a distance. It keeps you appraising, registering, admiring. Surrender asks you to stop noticing how the trick is done, and Resurrection will not let you stop noticing for a moment.
The film mourns a kind of cinema that makes you forget you are watching a film. It is itself the kind of cinema that never lets you forget.
There is something else going on too, and this one is quieter and more personal.
Kaili Blues and Long Day’s Journey Into Night were films that only Bi Gan could have made. They were rooted in specific memory, specific geography, specific grief. You felt the weight of his own life in them. Resurrection is vast and impersonal by comparison. It quotes Murnau, it nods to Melies, it moves through a century of cinema with the devotion of someone revisiting every house they have ever loved. But whose house is it? The film believes it is grieving for cinema at large. Watch it again and you start to feel that the grief is Bi Gan’s own, though he cannot quite see it himself.
He has left home. Not just geographically, but in the deeper creative sense. The move from intimate personal filmmaking to epic metatextual spectacle is dressed here as an act of love for cinema. But it is also, without meaning to be, an elegy for the smaller, more vulnerable films he used to make and may never make again. The monster who can only live inside the movies is, at some level, the director himself. Hiding in cinema history because his own story has become too large and too watched to approach directly.
Which brings us to Fellini, because it would be almost negligent not to.
8½ (1963) is the film you have to place next to this one. Both are about a creator disappearing into the act of creation. Both move on dream logic rather than plot logic. Both are ferociously in love with cinema as a place of refuge. But Fellini’s Guido is drowning, and the film knows it. 8½ is simultaneously seduced by its hero’s self-absorption and horrified by it. It looks the whole thing in the eye: the escapism, the cowardice, the genuine beauty of living inside imagination, the very real cost of refusing to live anywhere else. Bi Gan’s Deliriant is also drowning, but Resurrection only finds this beautiful. It never once asks whether the dreaming is a gift or a trap. It has already decided. And that certainty, however gorgeous, is what keeps the film from reaching the emotional depths that 8½ finds by being genuinely, painfully unsure.
The second film worth watching alongside it is Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983). Also a meditation on cinema and memory. Also asking what images do to us and what we do to images. But Marker builds his entire film around his own uncertainty. He does not know if images preserve or betray or simply replace what they are meant to remember, and he tells you this directly, and that honesty is devastating in the best way. Resurrection has reached all its conclusions before the opening frame. Cinema is sacred. Dreams are life. The monster is right. When a film about the mystery of images has no mystery left in it, something essential has gone missing.
None of which makes Resurrection anything less than extraordinary. There are sequences in this film that I genuinely could not believe I was watching. The long take alone, all thirty minutes of it, blood red fading to morning blue through rain-drenched streets, is worth the price of admission and then some. Bi Gan is one of the most gifted filmmakers alive, and this is his most ambitious work by a distance.
But the film does not know that it has built a monument to an experience it cannot provide. It wants you to surrender to it. It simply will not stop reminding you how remarkable it is long enough to let you try. Maybe that is the most honest thing about it. In a world that has forgotten how to dream, even the dreamers have forgotten what dreaming actually felt like.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
8½ (Fellini, 1963): a filmmaker who also disappears into his obsessions, but with far less certainty that the disappearing is beautiful.
Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983): a film about memory and images that does not know what it believes and is honest enough to say so. The contrast with Resurrection is quietly devastating.
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