RESURRECTION
Directed by: Bi Gan Starring: Jackson Yee, Shu Qi, Mark Chao Certificate: 15 Released: 13 March 2026 Rating: 8/10
Bi Gan’s first feature, Kaili Blues (2015), made when he was just 25, was notable for a remarkable 41-minute road trip accomplished in a single bravura shot. Midway through, his second film, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018) transformed into an hour-long 3D dream sequence. Now he returns with Resurrection, a surreal 160-minute, six-part portmanteau film, which concludes with a relatively modest 30-minute one-shot, which nevertheless took more than two weeks to film.
If previous generations of movie brats grew up schooling themselves in fleapits, grindhouses and video stores, then Bi Gan represents a millennial generation who have intravenously mainlined a century of film via the internet. First bewitched by Tarkovsky as a film student in Taiyuan, he now feels like a self-conscious heir to Welles, Godard, Carax, Lynch and Wong Kar-wai, creating films that sail drunkenly through dream, memory and the history of film and somehow gross millions at the Chinese box office.
Resurrection naturally begins in an era where the secret of eternal life has been discovered to be very simple: stop dreaming. Nevertheless, some rogue "Deliriants" remain attached to the habit and have to be re-educated, lest they continue to "bring pain to reality and chaos to history". One of the last dreamers, his Nosferatu skull as battered and cratered as a Méliès moon, is found hiding out in a decaying old movie house, and the film follows his dying memories, taking the form of six discrete chapters, supposedly corresponding to the six Buddhist senses, each in a different genre: silent caper, film noir, gangster fable, apocalyptic vampire flick...
It can all feel like one of those early surrealist escapades where Buñuel and pals would wander in and out of Parisian theatres guided by whim, to be ravished by spectacle without the distractions of narrative – though at 160 minutes the sensational convolutions can feel like a trial of patience rather than sensational rapture. Bi Gan can clearly do whatever he pleases with a camera and a screen – it remains to be seen whether he is an impressive technician (a Chinese Christopher Nolan?) or an artist with a more profound and compelling vision.
