Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan became a major figure in arthouse cinema with his 2015 debut Kaili Blues; it was followed in 2018 by Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The latter was an unlikely box-office hit in China, though it suffered a backlash from audiences sold a romantic epic by a savvy marketing campaign only to find a surreal and structurally ambitious film indebted to Tarkovsky and Lynch.
In 2025 Bi’s third movie, Resurrection, debuted at Cannes. It’s an oblique, dreamlike work with a nominal genre story; and it has similarly provoked praise and bafflement, sometimes from the same viewers. Now streaming on the Criterion Channel, Resurrection is a beautiful movie from its first frames to its last. And it’s an epic, more than two-and-a-half hours in length, telling a story across six chapters which span the lifespan of cinema and stretch into the future. It’s an elliptical epic, of a piece with Bi’s previous films, but an epic nevertheless.
At the start, a title card says that in the future humans have learned that the secret of eternal life is to give up dreaming. Some misfits, called “Deliriants,” continue to dream nevertheless: “They bring pain to reality and chaos to history. They send time into spasms.” But a few non-dreamers, the Big Others, can go into their dreams and pull them back to reality.
We follow one of these Others (Shu Qi) as she goes into the dreams of a dying Deliriant (Jackson Yee), trying to understand him and why he’d throw away eternal life. While the setting sounds like a sort of dystopia pitting dreamers against authoritarians, the movie doesn’t play out that way. The Deliriant isn’t a radical freedom-fighter; the Other isn’t obviously part of a thought-police.
There’s instead bafflement and a desire to understand the inexplicable in the Other’s relationship to the dying Deliriant, a relationship mainly restricted to the opening and closing sequences. Those play as a frame for four dreams, each of which presents a story of a different genre from across the course of the 20th century, with Yee always at the center, playing a different role in each.
A noirish spy story ends up with a confrontation in a house of mirrors. A former monk spends the night in his old abandoned monastery and meets a spirit. A conman tries to use a little girl to trick a rich man into believing in psychic powers. A man on the last night of 1999 meets a woman who might be a vampire.
These sound like the hooks for straightforward narratives, and there’s real storytelling energy in these four pieces. They’re shot in distinct ways, with varied color palettes, and the last story done as a single long take. But the way their plots are structured are different from standard genre pieces.
Conversations and dreams and allusions are the key points of these stories, not fight scenes (which might happen in the background) or Mexican standoffs. They’re not lacking in tension, or even in physical jeopardy for the characters. But metaphysical jeopardy is usually more significant, looming over the narrative to be symbolically resolved at the climax.
In theory these tales are dreams, but they don’t play as dreams. They’re coherent narratives, and we empathize with the characters. The most dreamlike parts of the film, operating on the most surreal logic, are the framing sequences which are supposedly outside the Deliriant’s dreams.
But the opening chapter tells us this is a movie about film as well as dreams when the Other opens up the Deliriant’s torso and finds it’s a movie projector. So the cinematic quality of the dreams is deliberate. Movies are dreams, and are as important as dreams.
In this light, Resurrection playing about with cinematic form makes sense. So do its pastiches of silent-film techniques and genre structure. It’s a movie about movies, and about connection through film. Resurrection opens and closes with puzzling images of an audience and a theater; a reminder that you’re watching a movie, and as long as the film goes on you’re part of the eternal audience.
What’s striking is that Resurrection avoids becoming a bloodless formal exercise. There are riddles, but also strong stories with powerful emotional concerns at their center. The four dreams are about love and about family. They’re about human connection, which is reflected in the frame.
The structure of the film makes us ponder the relationship between the Other and the Deliriant. The Other never appears in the dreams—she’s the audience—but the dreams give us a sense of who the Deliriant is. The stories let us triangulate on this future misfit who lives and dies for dreams and cinema. And they let the Other come to understand him too, so that the close to the framing sequence is powerful and uplifting even if the meaning hasn’t become clear.
Questions abound; the movie’s something to meditate on. Does the title mean the Deliriant’s resurrected? If so, is the resurrection literal or symbolic? Most of the stories blur the line between the living and the dead; is this the Deliriant subconsciously reacting to his past, or looking ahead to what awaits him? Or is it simply the case that a film’s resurrected any time it’s seen?
Resurrection’s not a simple movie. It’s enigmatic, but satisfying. You get four solid straightforward stories with beautiful framing sequences, and you can decide how they link up. The more you reflect on the movie the more meanings you can find in it. It’s in the best traditions of genre storytelling, mixing the visionary and the narrative to spark the audience’s imagination.