Resurrection
In Resurrection (Kuang ye shi dai), Bi Gan returns with a film that is at once an intoxicating reverie and an intellectual endurance test – a work so laden with invented terminology and pseudo-mystical world-building that it sometimes feels like it should come with footnotes. The story follows a woman known as the “Big Other” (Shu Qi) in a post-apocalyptic future, who revives a dreaming android (Jackson Yee) by recounting the entire history of China, filtered through a lens of cinematic homage. It’s ambitious, but this is less a narrative than a series of sumptuous, slow-moving tableaux. Each image is meticulously composed and undeniably beautiful, but together they cohere with the logic of a fever dream.
Structured around a series of vignettes across different cinematic epochs – from silent-era expressionism to Hong Kong crime noir to 90s realism – Resurrection sees Bi throwing everything at the wall. Some sequences captivate: a mute, obsessive creature with the pallor and gait of Count Orlok skulks through a gorgeously rendered shadow world; a surreal Buddhist art heist culminates in a statue that appears to come to life.
But then come the “Fantasmers,” the “Big Others,” the agents who enforce the linearity of time — terms that sound like discarded Philip K Dick drafts and are delivered via lengthy intertitles. The more Bi Gan tries to explain his world, the less comprehensible it becomes. Visually, however, the film is never less than exquisite. Bi’s real gift lies in the image – the astonishing set design, the velvety, hyper-composed frames that hover somewhere between cinema and installation art. His dreamscapes have a tactile, painterly precision, and at times, the picture abandons narrative altogether, becoming something closer to video art – a moving gallery of cinema’s ghosts.
Bi Gan’s reverence for cinema runs deep – his cinephilia isn’t just worn as a badge of honour; it’s woven into every frame. But while Resurrection is seductive in its imagery and audacious in its structure, it’s also fragmented, opaque, and so caught up in its own references that it often leaves the viewer behind.
Christina Yang
Resurrection does not have a release date yet.
Read more reviews from our Cannes Film Festival coverage here.
For further information about the event visit the Cannes Film Festival website here.
Watch the trailer for Resurrection here:
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