“Talking about dreams is like talking about movies,” Federico Fellini told Rolling Stone in a 1984 interview, “since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of images. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.”

The frequently enigmatic Chinese director Bi Gan would no doubt agree. Resurrection, which takes place in an alternate reality where only a select few can still dream (the “Deliriants”), is a metatheatrical journey through a century of moviemaking. A mesmeric film of uncompromising beauty, Resurrection fulfills Fellini’s maxim in nearly every way. Here, cinema acts as the melting corpse of history. It is the only place where time acts on two fronts, giving us multiple lifetimes in the neat span of two hours.

Resurrection Beautifully Captures the Journey of Finding Meaning in Art

Told in six, interconnected yet standalone parts, Resurrection acts in conversation with several points of the development of the cinematic language. Its first, and, arguably, most successful part is a silent film told in explicitly German Expressionist style. Recalling the original Phantom of the Opera, Jackson Yee plays a monster who refuses to leave the world of dreams, and is therefore dying a slow, excruciating death. In the opening intertitles, we are told that the Deliriants bring chaos into an otherwise peaceful world, and that the price is the refusal of immortality.

Miss Shu (Shu Qi) is of a class of people tasked with tracking down Deliriants and forcibly removing them from dreams. An elegant taskmaster, she cannot, at first, understand why anyone would want to exist here. As she chases the Monster through the labyrinthine production design by Liu Qiang and Tu Nan, she finds herself caught in Lumière-like backdrops, props and other pieces of cinematic trickery.

If the first part recalls the explosion of inventiveness which exploded in cinema’s early years, from D.W. Griffith to F.W. Murnau, the second part leaps to the haze of film noir. The Deliriant is now Qiu, being investigated for murder by the Commander (Mark Chao), in a plot that grows increasingly thick with mystery. Resurrection follows a pattern like this for a while, in which each segment advances with the full weight of history — cinematic, Chinese, sociological, political — behind its back.

For Bi Gan, it seems like artificiality is merely a technical term in an art form that demands unconditional belief.

In the film’s most straightforward narrative, Yee plays a card swindler who takes a young girl (Guo Mucheng) under his wing to win stacks of cash in an Italian Neorealist-like scam. The two bond but are irrepressibly under the pressure of economic demands, yet, their dreams, manufactured as they are, still succeed in providing respite. For Bi Gan, it seems like artificiality is merely a technical term in an art form that demands unconditional belief.

For some, movies are fleeting; for others, they are matters of life and death. In Resurrection, they are all of the above. The film’s last section, showcasing as it does through a one-take runner through an entire city, floats between moments of urgency and moments of ephemeral ethereality. Characters can do anything. They can suddenly change shape, get shot, belt karaoke, and live several lives. It’s best not to think about it too hard, this is just what cinema does.

Shot with alacrity by Dong Jinsong, who also collaborated with Bi Gan on Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Resurrection is one of the most gorgeously photographed films of the year. The winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 2025 is a stunning feat in both narrative and imagistic terms, as Jinsong provides countless cinematographic techniques. In one section set inside an old, dilapidated and abandoned Buddhist temple, the gently falling snow is exquisitely captured in mind-boggling contrast against the cold, metallic grey of the crumbling structure. The final segment, jumping from a blood-red wash to the neon hues of a seedy bar, is technically astounding.

Bi Gan has always been an audacious filmmaker with remarkable ambition, but Resurrection is amongst his most emotionally effective. Like Tsai Ming-Liang’s seminal Goodbye, Dragon Inn, which lovingly exhumes the ghosts of this art form’s storied past, Resurrection immortalizes the cinema-goer as an integral part of the filmmaking process. Succumbing to its curious flow and thick opacity feels like getting sucked up into the imagination of a cinephilic, otherworldly being.

A two hour and forty minute reverie which haptically portrays the unceasing search for meaning in art, Resurrection is both testament to the importance of storytelling, as well as the dangers of falling too far within its rabbit hole. But with stories as wrenching and images as evocative as these, why not jump in?