Resurrection (2025) dir. Bi Gan
The death of cinema.
Watched: 21 February 2026
Rating: ★★★★
The world is an illusion, but it is an illusion which we must take seriously, because it is real as far as it goes, and in those aspects of the reality which we are capable of apprehending. Our business is to wake up. We have to find ways in which to detect the whole of reality in the one illusory part which our self-centered consciousness permits us to see. We must not live thoughtlessly, taking our illusion for the complete reality, but at the same time we must not live too thoughtfully in the sense of trying to escape from the dream state. We must continually be on our watch for ways in which we may enlarge our consciousness. We must not attempt to live outside the world, which is given us, but we must somehow learn how to transform it and transfigure it. Too much ‘wisdom’ is as bad as too little wisdom, and there must be no magic tricks. We must learn to come to reality without the enchanter’s wand and his book of the words. One must find a way of being in this world while not being of it. A way of living in time without being completely swallowed up in time.
– Aldous Huxley, “Shakespeare and Religion”
It’s been a while since I’ve felt able to give myself over to a film and lose myself in its world.
In the alternate reality of Resurrection, humans are immortal so long as they don’t dream. Those who dream are called “Deliriants” (or, in some translations, “Fantasmers”) and they are hunted and killed to ensure that the dreaming ‘disease’ doesn’t spread. In the opening scene, we meet a Deliriant who hides inside films and eats opium flowers so he can continue to dream. Addiction fuelling delirium, itself a drug. In the opening scene, he’s followed by a woman, one of the hunters, and found in the depths of a silent film. Accepting his fate, he asks her to kill him. And she does so — but first, upon discovering that his body is a film reel projector, she allows him to play out a series of final dreams before dying. She can’t understand what he has been clinging to, why he has continued to dream all the while knowing it is illusion, knowing that it means death.
What follows are the dreams that play out for him. They dance through many eras, many genres. What a joy to see intense warmth and variability of colour when we have been treated to such drab palettes this era of film. Each segment covers a sense and we are taken on a journey of disembodiment, as each of the senses are shut down one by one (which Xinyuan Wang for Senses of Cinema points out), as the spirit leaves the body, each of the sacrifices insufficient. There is no raising of the dead, no resurrection except for each viewing of each film. Each time it is played, it lives again.
At the time, I gave myself over to the fact that the dreams weren’t and didn’t have to be related in a way that I could understand. I gave myself over to not trying to probe for meaning, especially after people started leaving partway through the first dream. And it reminded me greatly of stream-of-consciousness novels where the mind goes where it goes with no explanation, no rational logic that you or I could explain to one another. It is only when you stop trying to make intellectual sense of it, only when you surrender to the experience, that it finally clicks. In hindsight, I think a thread that runs through the dreams is that of sacrifice: what do we give up that we regret, and what do we pay in order to get back what can never be returned? In the first dream, the Commander gives up his hearing in order to obtain Qiu, the true “briefcase”. In the second dream, the former monk had sacrificed his father by mercy-killing him after he contracted rabies and he offers this truth for the spirit’s enlightenment. In the third, an old man tries to recover the words from a dead daughter and a daughter does what she can to get to her lost father — both knowing, all the time, that it is futile but still enacting the dream in the hope of its completion. In the final dream, the Deliriant sacrifices himself for love at the hands of a vampire: a sleepless, dreamless, immortal creature who consumes him. He could’ve escaped but he gave himself to her in a most human gesture.
It is trite to say that the whole film is an allegory and a memorial for the death of cinema. The Deliriant is presented as a literal body of film. But it’s been so long since I’ve seen anyone play with and explore the full possibilities of film as a medium. The cinematography and the composition of the shots were gorgeous, the use of sound was incredible, the massive long take felt at some points like a video game, the use of reflection and mirrors throughout was beautiful, the colour grading and tones were so varied — it was self-consciously excessive, but deserved. It revelled in itself, in the inevitability of death; it revelled in beauty. And I wanted someone to swoop in and save the day, perhaps turn around the fate of this Deliriant. But there isn’t a ‘chosen one’, as in fantasy. This Deliriant, he’s the final holdout, but it’s self-destruction. It brought to mind the lines from Romeo and Juliet: “These violent delights have violent ends, and in their triumph die, like fire and powder which as they kiss consume”. There is no saving anything — it’s just one last gasp before the candle is snuffed out, but god we can at least try and make it beautiful. And so, I think it’s more than just a ‘love letter to cinema’. I think there’s something to be said for it as a commentary on the very human impulse to remember and love, even as the things that make us human are being sold, sacrificed, and rendered unto the machine for immortality.
I think there’s something so human about being dealt a hand and forever trying to beat those odds in pursuit of what we collectively hold to be beautiful precisely because we can never possess it for ourselves – it is beyond us, it will never be a permanent success, it must always die. There’s a poem I love called We Were All Odysseus in Those Days by Amorak Huey that ends: “We all want the same thing / from this world: / Call me nobody. Let me live.” We’re all just trying to cheat death, which comes for us all in the end. And what better way, what alternative is even there, than to live as vibrantly, as fully as possible while we can?
The film was particularly powerful for its defiance in the face of death — the willingness to dare to keep dreaming. And a challenge, I think, to encourage the continuation of human vision and creativity in the burgeoning age of AI. In the face of the machine, in our death throes, we shouldn’t squander the opportunity to create things of beauty, works that we love, that reflect the heart of what it means to be human: to see, taste, touch, smell, feel, think, remember, imagine, dream… to exercise and embrace that even as being human shortens our “lifespan” as a species. For what is the use of immortality if we must spend it in a sterile, dreamless reality, unable to express the core of our very being because we are stripped of the ability by never learning it in the first place? Humans have historically been enamoured of describing ourselves in the language of the technology of the day — I fear the possibility that we may look upon dreamless robots (of our own creation, no less) and seek to fashion ourselves in their image.
A love letter to the cinema? I think it is far more than that. It is a love letter to the human spirit and the reluctance to let go of that which is dearest to us without one final triumph.