Critics Campus 2025 participant Claire Ollivain delves into the metatextual sensorial epic that is Bi Gan’s Resurrection, finding that the film champions cinephilia and the experiential in a world of simplistic and subjugating screens.

A title card transforms into a whirlpool of flames, scorching a hole through a curtain to expose a movie theatre audience stunned by the revelation behind them. They stare back at us and struggle over their seats as if trying to burst into the fabric of our own world. But before they can, a group of uniformed men empties the theatre – a Brechtian relic designed by Liu Qiang and Tu Nan – of these desperate onlookers. From the very first moments of Bi Gan’s 2025 film Resurrection, cinema’s illusion proves irresistible.

Having its Australian premiere at this year’s MIFF, Bi’s latest arthouse feature is an ambitious meta-cinematic epic that opens a portal to 100 years of film history. It is another triumph of bold experimentation, coming seven years after the premiere of Bi’s hypnotic Long Day’s Journey Into Night (MIFF 2019), and for the Chinese cineaste’s dedicated followers, the film will be worth the wait. A homage to cinema’s past, Resurrection invites us to imagine the artform’s future.

For a work that resists clear-cut interpretation, Resurrection lays out its premise in surprisingly explicit terms. Bi envisages a future where humanity has discovered that not dreaming is the key to immortality. Using title cards evocative of the silent-film era, the auteur explains that individuals who still indulge in reverie are known as ‘Fantasmers’ and those seeking to extinguish their rebellious flames are the ‘Big Others’. In Resurrection, humans live forever like a candle that never burns, and Bi wields this image as an extended metaphor, using it to punctuate each of the film’s six chapters. The film follows one Fantasmer, played by Chinese pop star and actor Jackson Yee, as he shapeshifts through five different scenarios or ‘dreams’. Each situation represents a different sense – sight, sound, taste, smell, touch – and appropriates a film style, from the sharp production design of the German expressionists to the lyrical cinematography of 90s Wong Kar-wai.

At the start of the film, the Fantasmer, introduced to us as a monster in the guise of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 horror Nosferatu, is caught by a Big Other. The elegant figure, played by Shu Qi (The Assassin, MIFF 2015; Millennium Mambo, MIFF 2002), questions why he dreams, to which our protagonist insists: “Illusions may bring pain, but they are incredibly real.” In an unexpected act of mercy, the Big Other allows him a few more dreams. She spools a reel of film in the open wound of his back; with celluloid in place of organs, the Fantasmer is cinema incarnate. Rejected by a world where imagination is outlawed, this movie monster’s desire for the full breadth of sensory experience at the cost of mortality is what makes him irrevocably human.

Bi’s premonition of the future, where unconscious life is under threat, is a disturbing one. The nocturnal movie theatres of our dreams may be the final bastion against an image hierarchy that prioritises the algorithmic and the marketable. In a world where most of our engagement with moving images inhibits full sensorial immersion, Bi rearranges the vocabulary of film movements from the past to locate a grammar fit for the twenty-first century. “My creative process hasn’t changed much,” the director tells The Hollywood Reporter in a recent interview, “but the world has. And that made me feel like I had to finally make this film now.”

Resurrection

Created on the heels of the COVID-19 lockdowns, Resurrection suggests that dreams – and their material life in cinema – might be the antidotes to alienation. Our surrogate worlds are real. The way Bi switches between narratives and experiments with multi-temporality almost reflects how we scroll through TikTok clips and Instagram reels. Each video is a distinct experience, operating according to its own logic. What is so inventive about Resurrection is how Bi adopts and enriches our dominant mode of digital engagement through highly stylised artistic treatments.

“Screens are getting smaller and smaller,” the director explains in an interview with Variety, “and I want to evoke that old feeling of watching films in theaters.” But Resurrection is not another nostalgic tribute to twentieth-century cinema that forgoes its spirit of inventiveness (see: Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, also screening at MIFF 2025). Bi’s film might conjure melancholic images of cinema’s death – with, for example, wax theatre seats melting into gravestones – but Resurrection is far from a lament. The film revives “that old feeling” by transfusing moments of idiosyncratic playfulness into historic film languages.

Bi wants us to lose ourselves in cinema, but he knows he’s working against a trend of shorter attention spans and omnipresent distractions. He leans in to the immersive nature of dreams by employing breathtaking visual effects. The long take, a distinctive feature at the end of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, makes a brilliant return in Resurrection. In the latter’s fifth segment, Bi uses the technique to transport us through a New Year’s party at an industrial port in China. It’s 1999 and the apocalypse is on everyone’s mind. Working again with Long Day’s Journey cinematographer Dong Jingsong, Bi floods the scene with an eerie crimson light. Li Danfeng’s sound design adds a haunting layer as we hear a character’s menacing footsteps, sharp inhales and chilling hums. Similar to Gaspar Noé’s surrealist drama Enter the Void (MIFF 2010), Resurrection uses subjectivity to mimic a first-person videogame or virtual reality. Bi heightens our corporeal identification with his characters and grants further access to their worlds by introducing recurring shots of corridors, archways and laneways throughout the film.

The sensation of viewing Resurrection resembles that of sneaking into a large multiplex, or of eagerly packing your schedule at a film festival. You open the theatre doors to one feature, then stay as long as you can before moving on to the next. There is a fragmentation of the self at play, a collage of subjectivities patched onto our own. Bi captures this experience in Resurrection, transforming us into his Frankensteinian movie monsters and awakening our desire to climb back into the screen.

Resurrection screens on Wednesday 13, Thursday 21, Saturday 23 and Sunday 24 August as part of the MIFF 2025 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.