Resurrection is the third feature from Bi Gan (following Long Day’s Journey Into Night), and it arrives via The Criterion Collection under their “Premieres” banner for recent releases that have yet to earn a spine number, but still receive the label’s treatment. Admittedly I came to this film a little late, after the festival buzz had already turned into expectation, held off initially by that two-and-a-half-hour runtime. But as a Saturday watch, it lands in a near-ideal sweet spot—unhurried, immersive, and just disorienting enough to pull you under.
Set in a distant future where humanity has traded dreams for a kind of numbing immortality, the film follows Jackson Yee as a “Deliriant”—a rare dissenter who rejects endless life in favor of the ability to dream. It’s a great piece of speculative world-building, but Bi Gan treats it less like hard sci-fi and more like a conceptual doorway. Here the Deliriant hides within the fossilized medium of cinema itself—literally embedded in a silent film, grotesquely transformed and sustaining his dream-state in an opium den. When a hunter of Deliriants finds him, she extracts him from the filmstrip, but her curiosity lures her into his world as she enters his dreams as he begins to die, moving through them like a traveler across a century of cinema.
From there, Resurrection fractures into something closer to an anthology, though one unified by a clear philosophical spine. The six segments correspond to the six senses in Buddhist thought—sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and mind—each one refracted through a different mode of 20th-century cinema. Bi Gan leans into dream logic hard: narratives arrive mid-thought, resolve themselves elliptically, and often leave negative space where a more conventional film would insist on closure. But that’s the point. These aren’t incomplete stories so much as sketches that capture the moment of creative spark, before it calcifies into something fixed.
And that energy—raw, searching, unfinished in the best way—carries this film. Each segment feels like a séance for a different lost cinematic language, channeling textures and genres that feel both lovingly resurrected and slightly uncanny. It’s more cohesive than most anthology films precisely because it’s less concerned with plot than with sensation and recurrence—how images, emotions, and identities echo across time. So it plays as both a meditation on cinema and a kind of spiritual self-portrait.
If any of that sparks something, I can’t recommend Resurrection enough. But calibrate your expectations: if you’re walking in hoping for something Minority Report-adjacent, sleek and plot-driven, you’re in the wrong theater. This is far closer to Wong Kar-wai than Steven Spielberg—less concerned with where it’s going than how it feels getting there.
