Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night was one of the formative films of the last decade; opening with a dazzling 30 minute long shot take before dropping us right into the title cards in a way that no other film has really done before – breathtakingly brilliant and completely unique in ambition. It comes as no surprise that Resurrection is just about as one of a kind as you’d hope a Bi Gan-directed science fiction epic existing outside the memory of time and space would be; a fragmented descent into Chinese history through the leering framework of a camera – brave in its vision: the opening 20 minutes this time are silent as we see a monster entranced by the visions of a dreamworld at a time where humanity have lost the ability to dream.
Told across six chapters and already nearly three hours long; thirty minutes was cut from a screening earlier in the year to make it tighter and more focused. It works in its favour – the final few chapters are where the storyline is at its mystifying peak – the card-game scam tricks fading into a vampire-centric storyline at the turn of the millennium with breathtakingly beautiful firework shots, this film moves you from a decade of history in a similar way to what Zhang Yimou tried to accomplish with One Second, or say; what Godard tried with his late period work. This here is an ode to life as the master – it’s not a love letter-to cinema, far from that; but the difference between life and cinema, art as an understanding in a way that’s just about unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
Would you rather die and dream than live forever and not? That’s the question that propels Bi Gan’s story towards its conclusion – it’s the most Bi Gan film that has plenty of skin-crawling violence when it gets going. His movements and explorations of the different genres and eras of history are fascinating to watch as the film takes its turn through all of them – noir one second; vampire horror the next – the final chapter where the two doomed lovers are on a boat is one of the most heartbreaking scenes I’ve seen this year – and it’s completely rewarding staying to the end. The kind of film that evokes memories of Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark, which I’d bet was used as an inspiration for capturing different times and places; presented in a visually appealing way unlike no other.
The best film of 2025 – and a shoe-in for any year, it’ll make you laugh and cry, sometimes both at the same time – it does everything cinema exists to do; an assault on the senses – I was alerted specifically to the way Bi Gan uses sound in this film; heightened than ever – and a stirring and formally ambitious work capable of inspiring entire generations if it’s ever given a platform to do so. I struggle to think of anyone else being able to put together something as compellingly rich as this – the longer it stays on your mind, the more it lingers – the more you warm to its ambition and where it’s going.
Masters like Méliès and Murnau are given their dues here, Méliès in particular; Bi Gan’s love affair with the labyrinth of history is easy to fall in love with for anyone obsessed with film and there are shades of Wong Kar-Wai when a more contemporary framework is reached. It’s a puzzle box of rapid emotions, a real onslaught – formally ambitious and genre-defying (and defining) in every sense. Actors Jackson Yee and Shu Qi are fantastic in their multiple roles; able to offer up a sense of surprise as the story switches and turns, and the chapters each could be their own film in their own right – it’s like Bi Gan saying these are movies that I’d love to make but wouldn’t be able to make entire features of – let’s combine them all for an effort of the human language and a love-letter to humanity as a whole; as much as cinema itself – to call it just a love letter to cinema feels like it almost makes Resurrection weaker than it is – it’s a meditative study on dreams and character.
In an out of urban slums, rich mansions, lucid train journeys; noir detectives investigating cold cases, con artists teaching a young girl tricks for a big score, and a punk falling in love with a vampire; the film exists as an exploration of the senses – sound, sight, and more – industrial landscapes all shown with astounding beauty by DP Dong Jingsong. He’s worked on Wild Goose Lake as well as Long Day’s Journey Into Night and you’d be hard pressed to argue against a better of photography currently operating in cinema – each shot is beautiful enough to be a museum centrepiece in its own right; the whole film together – a masterpiece – the fog – I want to know how they did the fog. The best movies leave you questioning how they were made and Resurrection does so much more than that – it breathes the essence of life into cinema is a medium.