RESURRECTION (狂野时代) (2025)

Genre: Fantasy/Science Fiction
Director: Bi Gan
Cast: Jackson Yee, Shu Qi, Mark Chao, Li Gengxi
Runtime: 2 hr 40 mins
Rating: NC16 (Some Drug Use and Violence)
Released By: Shaw 

Opening Day: 28 November 2025

Synopsis: Resurrection is Bi Gan’s love letter to cinema and a meditation on the endurance of dreams amidst fading images. Unfolding in a series of dreams, Resurrection is composed of six chapters that weave together key moments in 20th-century film and Chinese history. The narrative drifts ethereally yet inexorably towards a future where humanity has lost the ability to dream. With an ensemble cast spanning multiple timelines, Jackson Yee’s ever-morphing protagonist reincarnates across different eras, whilst a Miss Shu played by Shu Qi serves as the film’s narrator.

Movie Review:

Bi Gan’s Resurrection is the kind of film that resists summary, interpretation, and perhaps even comprehension—and that’s part of its spell. Across its 160 minutes, this reviewer could never claim to fully grasp the totality of what was unfolding on screen. But understanding, in the literal sense, feels beside the point. What the film offers instead is a sensory immersion so rich, so strange, and so startlingly beautiful that it becomes its own reward.

Structured in six chapters—one for each of the five senses, plus the mind—Resurrection is both an anthology and a continuous dream-state. Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan, always a bold stylist, uses each segment to explore a different emotional texture, visual language, and philosophical thread. The cumulative effect is hypnotic. You don’t watch the film so much as drift through it. This is the same experience this writer felt when watching his last feature Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018).

Set during a “wild time” when humanity has traded away the ability to dream in exchange for longevity, Bi’s story follows Miss Shu (a luminous and enigmatic Shu Qi), who tracks down a “Deliriant”—one of the rare beings who still possesses the capacity for dream-life. The Deliriant, played with delicate restraint by the ever-versatile Jackson Yee, becomes a conduit through which the film examines memory, imagination, as well as the pain and ecstasy of longing.

The opening chapter instantly announces Bi Gan’s audacity: it plays like a silent film, complete with title cards for dialogue. This stylistic gambit not only disorients in a delicious way but also heightens the emotional clarity of the images. Later, the striking sequence of Miss Shu installing a film projector inside the Deliriant is one of the film’s most poetic metaphors—an image of cinema literally embedded within the human body.

Each chapter distinguishes itself with its own mood and visual grammar. Some are more haunting than others. The segment featuring Mark Chao turns into an artful, fever-dream cat-and-mouse pursuit between a police commander and an accused murderer—part noir, part hallucination. Another, featuring Zhang Zhijian as a sly trickster-spirit, plays almost like a modern xiangsheng routine crossed with a moral fable, mischievous yet resonant.

The chapter centred on Guo Mucheng, playing a young girl hired to con strangers, is arguably the most accessible. Its emotional beats land cleanly, and its themes—deception, yearning, self-betrayal—surface with gentle clarity. But the film’s most breathtaking passage is the one involving Li Gengxi: a single, unbroken long take that guides viewers through a neon-soaked backstreet during the last hours of 1999 and the first moments of 2000. It is, quite simply, unforgettable—an intoxicating blend of melancholy and the quiet terror of time passing.

In the end, Resurrection, which was recognised with the Prix Spécial at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is less a narrative to decode than an experience to surrender to. Meaning exists if you wish to find it, but Bi never insists on it. Every viewer will walk away with something different—an image, a feeling, a question that continues to echo. And that, ultimately, is the enduring beauty of cinema: that it can leave us bewildered, moved, and transformed, without ever offering a single, definitive answer.

Movie Rating:

(A mesmerising, sense-drenched dreamscape, Resurrection is a film you feel rather than understand—Bi Gan crafts a cinematic trance so hypnotic that surrender becomes the only way through)

Review by John Li