‘Resurrection’ Is Gorgeous And Moving Cinema About Cinema

A visually rich odyssey about an artform’s role in our lives, Resurrection is fantastic cinema about cinema. Rather than taking the standard angle of telling how a movie was made, Bi Gan’s surreal film evokes the role that cinema and storytelling plays as an intrinsic part of our lives that lasts long after we’ve faded away.

At an indeterminate point in the future, humanity has figured out the secret to immortality: by forsaking the ability to dream entirely. Of course, there are still those who dream in secret, such as a Deliriant (Jackson Yee), who inhabits an ancient form of dreaming known as cinema.

The mysterious ‘Other One’ known as Miss Shu (Shu Qi) tracks down this Deliriant and decides to grant him the courtesy of a gentle death, done by installing a film projector inside of him. Thus, the two of them experience cinematic versions of the Deliriant’s dream life as he slowly dies.

It sounds rather complicated, but Resurrection follows an anthology film in structure in the way it’s divided into six distinct chapters. Although the film is very high concept in its setup, each of its different films within a film serve as highly effective vignettes of emotions and representations of different eras of cinema.

Resurrection captures the powerful emotions cinema can give us

Therein lies the brilliance of Resurrection as an investigation into cinema: its successful attempt to evoke the transcendent feeling watching movies can give you in broadly effective ways. Much of the imagery and narrative work on display here is deeply esoteric, operating on dream logic (appropriately) as it shifts between different modes of storytelling.

Yet that elusiveness, that unwillingness to ever just be one thing, is precisely what makes Resurrection such a sumptuous cinematic work. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Bi Gan is such an apparently talented filmmaker, with an eye for identifying the human heart in every story to create some surprisingly moving sequences.

This is a drop-dead gorgeous film with some truly stunning sequences – particularly in its final story with one of the most impressive one-takes I’ve ever seen. Although it clearly takes inspiration from cinema across the world, Gan never feels chained to his influences as he seemingly creates a new mode of seeing cinema.

Paired with a sensational Jackson Yee performance where he plays a different version of his character across six tales and a hundred in-film years, Resurrection seems to understand the interplay between cinema and dreams as modes of imagination for the human mind.

Not every tableau is equally effective, and I expect that its unwillingness to be pinned down will leave a good chunk of viewers feeling icy. Yet Resurrection’s poignancy lies in how it defies definition – how could something as sprawling as cinema ever be defined in a singular film? It can’t, leading Gan to instead capture the feeling and emotions that this artform gives us in a sincerely affecting and impressively made work.

★★★★

Resurrection is playing in select cinemas now.