Before dropping my top ten of 2025, sometime near the end of the season, there are a bunch of excellent films that have gone unreviewed at TFE. Let’s fix that…
With Warner Bros. for sale and Netflix as its most likely buyer, cinephiles worldwide are despairing over the future of the theatrical experience. As monopolies keep forming stateside, Hollywood seems bound to reach a breaking point any time soon, and the effects are already being felt beyond borders. And then there’s AI and a rising devaluing of human artistry, the production of content above all else. That said, to speak of the end feels premature, foolish even. Even if the mainstream American movie industry as we know it ceases to be, cinema is bigger than that. Indeed, it’s an art form still in its infancy, still transforming and coming into itself. If death is coming, it manifests as transformation and, in metamorphosis, there’s longevity that beckons hope. So, stop doomscrolling and hold tight to what you love, be it the medium itself or the communion of sitting in a dark room with others, facing the collective dream projected on a bright wall.
There’s a way to accept the pain of change without giving in to despair, to believe, to honor, to delight in the miracle of the moving image without falling into grief. Chinese wunderkind Bi Gan's latest, Resurrection, embodies such notions in ways few films have done. As it regards the past, it speaks to the present and the mystery of a future none of us can yet grasp. With equal parts adoration and sorrow, intellect and earnestness, sadness and a strange strain of fatalistic optimism, this multi-chaptered odyssey through the human senses whispers and screams: Cinema is dead. Long live cinema…
Resurrection is one of those films that can appear more narratively impenetrable than it actually is. The stylistic mediation between the face-value story and the audience is so insistent that one may feel lost, even frustrated, if you’re the kind who clings to “plot” as a life raft. To prevent metaphorical drownings and make this review a tad easier to articulate, let’s start by laying out the tale(s) of Resurrection, its basic narrative shape. If you want to avoid spoilers and meet this hallucination of a movie with a virgin brain – an understandable wish - I’ll give you a warning now. This is how the story goes.
***SPOILER WARNING***
In a faraway future, humanity has sacrificed the ability to dream in a pursuit of prolonged life. It’s a Faustian bargain some have rejected, continuing to dream. These outliers are the “Deliriants,” fated to be forever hunted by “The Other Ones.” Switch the terminology to an inversion of Replicants and Blade Runners, and you may get the gist of their existential cat-and-mouse game. Bi Gan’s sci-fi odyssey starts in the middle of their chase, as Miss Shu, an Other One, stalks a Deliriant into his dream. Grown monstrous in his rebellion, the man nevertheless earns his captor’s mercy. At the very least, she’s moved by him and his love for dreams, manifest as a love for cinema.
With grace, Shu places a film projector inside the dying Deliriant so he can spend his last moments in a projected reverie, a death rattle extended into a century of movies starring him in the lead role. If this framing device comes to us in purely visual terms – Resurrection adopts the language of silent film for this portion – the following tales each hone in on another human sense. Next comes hearing in the form of a postwar noir. It’s a detective story and a murder mystery of sorts, as Qiu – the Deliriant – is accused of killing a man and tortured by a police commander trying to find all the answers for a mystery without a key.
The seemingly unmotivated violence of the inciting death leads both characters down a spiral in which a new subgenre arises from the shadows. This is a spy thriller, too, with a MacGuffin straight out of Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly and a mirror labyrinth courtesy of Welles’ Lady of Shanghai. Bach plays on like a code, a secret, driving one man mad and leading to the destruction of both prey and predator. Thirty years later, we arrive at another narrative in the ruins of a Buddhist temple. It’s a metaphysical buddy comedy, and taste takes precedent over the other senses. The Deliriant is yet another criminal, Mongrel, who steals art and suffers from a bad toothache.
When he breaks the offending molar with the remains of a Buddha statue, the Spirit of Bitterness emerges from his dentin prison. Trapped alone in the temple, the pair communes with the human disclosing his guilt and shame. In the end, a ritual made possible by their collaboration releases both souls. Bitterness reaches Enlightenment while Mongrel’s sins are expiated by his transformation into a dog. Death is transfiguration and, in some ways, liberation. His next reincarnation is Jia, a con artist, living within a Neorealist tale built upon a meditation on smell. This time, he’s paired with a little orphan girl with extraordinary olfactory abilities.
She becomes his accomplice and, between the two, a surrogate father-daughter relationship blossoms, though neither dares to describe it as such. Abandonment and loss permeate the story, Bicycle Thieves into Paper Moon into something much sadder than those two put together. Still, there’s space for a dissonance, like a fart joke straight out of Ozu. As always, the Deliriant character dies by the end, leaving touch as the theme for the final chapter. Life ends in the same breath as the 20th century, with this tale taking place on New Year’s Eve, 1999 dawning into a new millennium. The Deliriant is Apollo, a petty gangster who’s never been kissed and comes across Tai Zhaomei, a gangster moll who yearns to bite someone.
In one uninterrupted long take, the last four hours before sunrise fly by in a dream of blood red fading into morning blue. It’s a gangster flick from Hollywood past married to the Chinese crime pictures of the last twenty years. It’s Murnau revived and mutated, his Song of Two Humans becoming an amorous Nosferatu. Because, of course, Zhaomei is a vampire and Apollo is her feast, their love an impossibility that leads to mutual destruction. Paying witness to the birth of a new day, he gets his kiss, she gets her bloody bite, they both fall in love and into death. Like Orlok and celluloid caressed by a flint, she burns.
***SPOILERS OVER***
So, this is and isn’t the story of Resurrection. Because, as one would expect from such a metatextual exercise, the medium is the story – or the message, if you adhere to McLuhan’s theory. In any case, Bi Gan is more of a dreamer than a straightforward storyteller, and his cinema is pulling for sensorial ecstasy rather than more commonplace narrative pleasures. There’s a kernel of truth to those who feel the director is perhaps too much of a technician, so focused on the audiovisual construction of cinema that he turns his films into showcases for big screen mechanics, the possibilities of the moving image celebrated but perhaps not used for anything other than their own exultation.
Figures on-screen sometimes seem to perceive the camera, and, through it, the audience that observes them. Such connections may inspire a mutual bond, though they also serve as conduit and justification for such haunting images as a wax picture place whose public sits still, melting into nothingness in another image of decay that can’t help but equate the end of cinema with a human life coming to a close. This is a ghost movie in many ways, specters refracted through a thousand and one formal devices and genre cocktails, visual traditions and signifiers, tricks of sight and sound, light, and an ever-shifting rainbow of colors. The steel blue of a tinted noir burns into bright flame, winter white like snow that’s disturbed by duckweed green, rotting yellow before blood makes everything scarlet and dawn returns us to blue.
It’s a cycle and, at times, the whole film feels like a spinning top caught in an unending circular motion. The trajectory of each tale, for instance, always concludes on the same annihilating note, searching for hope in a hopeless place, with the rhyming repetition suggesting a structuralist play. Dong Jinsong’s cinematography, so keen on stretched movements, often wears the costume of a meandering eye but surely reveals its design before the camera slots into the place it was always going to. The inevitability of tragedy is manifest. Or, perhaps, it’s another way of admitting the seventh art’s construction and lack of reality, the essential mediation that happens by the camera’s presence, the decision to cut or not to cut. It’s all a lie. But isn’t that the case for dreams, too? And aren’t both real in their own way?
These ideas percolate through all elements and all tend to go back to that circular motion of art about itself, film staring into the looking glass. The score by M83 is a push-and-pull of past and present that draws a musical ouroboros, where silent film-pastiche and electronic diffusion are both beginning and end. Liu Qiang and Tu Nan’s production design delineates a similar arc, always back to before, experimenting with more immersive materiality before returning to the over artifice of the medium at hand. Hell, even the performances encompass these notions of circularity, of cinema on a journey through its possibilities to end up back at the beginning – Jackson Yee plays five characters and all of them feel like an experiment, unstable yet set on the path to that final Resurrection.
So sure, Bi Gan’s work comprises a solipsistic cinema, though not a conceited one. It’s also not cold by any means. If something like the splendorous Kaili Blues could lean on Deleuzian notions of the time-image to risk alienation, Resurrection offers an emotional hook and then some. Don’t get me wrong, for those aspects are still present – take the contraction and dilation of time across a long take or the vision of an apple rotting impossibly quickly in a filmmaking sleight of hand trickery. But they are tempered by a sincerity that’s almost shocking in how plaintive and open it can be. Indeed, the picture is borderline sentimental, especially when quoting from the Neorealist playbook and indulging in quasi-juvenile innocence.
But that need not be a fault. Indeed, there’s something disarming about the earnestness coursing through the project’s veins, a counterpoint to the pronounced essayistic esoterism that can lead viewers to describe it as “intellectual” to end the conversation. Resurrection is all too happy to lose itself in the sentiment and in the hopeful possibility of cinema as conversation. Here, a conversation of effusive affection, as the screen speaks of various adorations and tries to partake in some kind of sharing, a communion of ecstasy. It’s painfully earnest in parts, tip-toing around derivation to better pull from films past, films beloved, films to share and to dream about – noir, Welles, Murnau, the postwar Italians, the wuxia kings, the Chinese crime dramas, and so many others I’ve mentioned and others I forgot.
Have patience for my sappy little heart, but I was incredibly moved by this eagerness to share loves I could feel across the screen. I was moved by much in Resurrection. By its worship at the altar of creation and human expression, handmade lunacies and spectacles, curios full of love be they grand edifices or papier mâché monsters. I was moved by the kindness with which the dying are ultimately met, honored, cared for in this descent into an oneiric abyss. By the burning celluloid phantasmagoria that proposes that to live forever would be worthless if we could not dream… dream in all the senses of the world. Moved by the visceral feeling of loss and melancholy that permeates every frame and every flourish. By the aching need to believe that there’s a beginning in every end.
Live. Die. Live again. And dream. Always dream.
Resurrection is still expanding after starting its limited theatrical release back in December, courtesy of Janus Films.