The look of it
Resurrection is a six-part science fiction film structured around Buddhist sensory categories — Sight, Hearing, Taste, Smell, Touch, Mind — and built on the premise that dreaming has been outlawed in exchange for extended life. It attempts to treat cinema itself as a dying ritual: a vessel for forbidden interiority, a technology of resurrection for memory, identity and sensation long suppressed. Bi Gan frames this not as allegory but as ontological infrastructure — the projector, the film stock, the long take, even the monster’s body are all literal conduits for what remains unrecordable in a world that has surrendered subjective time. The film does not argue for dreaming so much as enact it, using formal means — stop motion, double exposure, reverse motion, time-lapse — to fracture linear causality and reassemble narrative as somatic recurrence. Its ambition is neither predictive nor cautionary, but liturgical: to stage a rite in which image-making becomes indistinguishable from breathing, and watching becomes a form of participation in a vanishing practice. It treats the cinema auditorium not as a space of consumption but of consecration — wax theatres, silent title cards, liquid vaults — where duration is devotional, not commercial.
The shape of the story
The story moves across four nested dreams, each anchored by Jackson Yee’s Deliriant assuming a new identity — Qiu, the monk, Jia, Apollo — while Shu Qi’s character, named only ‘The Big Other’ in credits, operates as both guide and interlocutor, her presence calibrated through voiceover and costume rather than exposition. Performances avoid psychological realism: Yee’s shifts are physical and tonal, not interpretive; his face rarely betrays intention, and his bodies — scarred, ageing, decaying — carry history more than motivation. Dong Jingsong’s cinematography favours deep focus and slow lateral movement, often through narrow corridors or fogged glass, with lighting that privileges texture over legibility. M83’s score avoids leitmotif, instead layering analog synth drones beneath diegetic sounds — theremin wails, poppy-crunching, train whistles — so music feels excavated, not composed. Editing by Bi Gan and Bai Xue sustains rhythmic continuity across segments despite radical shifts in aspect ratio, grain, and temporal logic; the 30-minute take, shot on DJI Ronin 4D, functions less as spectacle than as gravitational centre — a sustained breath holding all other timelines in orbit.
What sticks to the skin
What lands is the film’s tactile fidelity to its own rules. The first segment, set in early 20th-century expressionist style, achieves its stated aim: black-and-white contrast, tilted angles and stop-motion shadows do not merely evoke Caligari but make silence feel like pressure, and light like threat. The monastery sequence works because its absurdity — a crumbling Buddha speaking about toothache — is delivered without inflection, letting the physical collapse of the statue and the monk’s precise, weary gestures carry theological weight. The card trick in the third dream lands not for its cleverness but for how the blindfolded girl’s deduction is filmed: tight on trembling fingers, then wide on empty air, making logic feel bodily. Even the New Year’s Eve vampire sequence succeeds in its restraint — no fangs, no gore, just Tai Zhaomei’s quiet thirst and Apollo’s uncomprehending generosity. These moments land because they trust duration over explanation, and treat metaphor as material fact rather than decorative flourish. The film earns its strangeness by refusing to translate it.
Where the frame bends
What does not land is the structural conceit of the six senses as organising principle. Though the film names them in order, the correspondence between segment and sense remains opaque — taste appears only in a single shot of poppy seeds; smell is invoked via ash but never embodied; touch is implied in the liquid vault but never rendered kinesthetically. The Buddhist framework feels appended rather than integrated, a scholarly scaffold that does not bear the weight of the narrative. Similarly, the ‘Deliriant’ concept — a monster who lives inside films — collapses under scrutiny: if he is literally housed in celluloid, why does he age across dreams? Why does he bleed? The film’s refusal to clarify undermines its central metaphor rather than deepening it. Mark Chao’s Commander, though physically imposing, lacks dimension beyond function — his ear-stabbing reads as gesture, not consequence. And the final wax theatre sequence, intended as apotheosis, arrives as anticlimax: its melting feels procedural, not inevitable, and the silhouetted light-figures lack the specificity that gives earlier imagery its gravity.
What it believes in
The themes that matter are mortality as medium, memory as contagion, and cinema as secular sacrament. Resurrection treats longevity not as triumph but as atrophy — a world where people live longer but forget how to dream, to grieve, to misremember. Each dream is an act of self-erasure disguised as survival: Qiu kills to escape capture; the monk kills his rabid father out of mercy; Jia breaks his promise to stay alive; Apollo dies for a kiss he barely understands. These are not moral failures but physiological necessities — ways the body preserves itself when meaning has been legislated out of existence. The film’s recurring motif of sound loss — stabbed ears, deafened theremin, silent title cards — frames listening as resistance. And the projector inside the Deliriant’s chest is not a gimmick but a thesis: the apparatus of recording is inseparable from the organism it records. This is not a film about the future of AI or surveillance, but about the future of attention — how we hold time when time no longer belongs to us.
Who it is for
This film is for viewers who treat cinema as architecture — those who notice how a corridor’s length affects breath, how a cut’s timing alters pulse, how silence can be louder than score. It rewards patience with texture, not payoff. It is not for viewers who require causal clarity, emotional signposting or narrative resolution — the film offers none. Those who expect science fiction to explain its worldbuilding will find Resurrection withholding; those who need performance to signal psychology will find Yee’s work opaque. It is also not for viewers allergic to durational risk: the 156-minute runtime includes stretches of near-stasis, and the long take demands surrender, not engagement. A viewer who values efficiency over immersion, or coherence over accumulation, will leave frustrated. That said, someone who found Long Day’s Journey Into Night compelling may still resist this — its structure is tighter, its metaphors denser, its refusal of comfort more absolute.
What it costs you
Yes, it is worth your evening — provided you approach it as a site of encounter, not consumption. Its value lies not in what it says but in how it occupies time: the weight of a paused frame, the drag of a tracking shot, the ache of a held breath. You will not leave with answers, but with residue — the afterimage of a melted theatre, the echo of a theremin played into deafness. Those who disagree are likely those who measure films by narrative yield per minute, or who believe emotional access must be earned through exposition. What would change the verdict? A shorter cut — not for pace, but to tighten the sensory logic — or a clearer articulation of how the six senses map onto the dreams. But as it stands, Resurrection earns its length not through spectacle, but through insistence: it refuses to let time pass without leaving a mark.
