Films are rarely made in response to film critics, so it is unlikely that Bi Gan’s wildly ambitious new film was inspired Susan Sontag’s 1996 essay “The Decay of Cinema.” In any case, Bi was six years old, living in Kaili, China, when Sontag declared in The New York Times that “cinema’s 100 years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline.” “If cinema can be resurrected,” she concluded, “it will only be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love.” Yet Resurrection, as Bi’s film is called in English (its Chinese title is more like “Savage Age”—Bi has made a habit of giving his movies quite different titles in English and Chinese), seems conceived in exactly those terms. Its action spans that same century of movies, unified less by any continuity of plot than by the conviction that this era has come to an end. Cinema is dead. It may yet live again, but first: let us remember.

What little overarching story *Resurrection *has comes on title cards in the opening moments: in the future, we are told, humanity has stopped dreaming in order to prolong our lifespans. The few who can still dream—called “Deliriants” or, in an earlier translation, “Fantasmers”—are outlaws, hunted down and subdued lest they threaten the longevity of everyone else. In the film’s first and last sections we see one such hunter, occasionally called “the Big Other” and played by the legendary Taiwanese actress Shu Qi, tracking a Deliriant, capturing him, and vivisecting him. Embedded in his back she finds a movie projector, and before she finally locks him away she peruses his dreams, or perhaps his memories, looking for truth in “the ancient and long-forgotten language of cinematography,” as she tells us in voiceover.

It is these dreams that make up the bulk of the movie: four separate stories, in four different genres and set at four points over the course of the twentieth century. Each features the young Chinese star Jackson Yee, who also plays the Deliriant, and each ends in irresolution or ambiguity before tumbling into the next. The first is a wartime noir about an officer’s growing obsession with a waifish murder suspect and a mysterious suitcase, the second a mid-Sixties ghost story about a prisoner who spends the night in a ruined temple and encounters a “spirit of bitterness,” the third an Eighties down-and-outer drama in which a drifter enlists an orphan in a scheme to convince a rich old man that she has supernatural powers, and the fourth a wild vampire romance in which a young couple meet, fall in love, and flee her gangster boss, all over the course of New Year’s Eve, 1999.

The prologue, for its part, is a silent melodrama set at the beginning of the century, and the epilogue, though featuring the same characters, is shot in a colder, more contemporary style. (Bi has said this section was originally planned to be science fiction, but he “lost interest” in that idea while making it: just a few bits of high-tech set design, and the premise, remain.) It is here, at the very end, that the film makes its clearest statement about its medium. After the Deliriant is disposed of—stowed away, possibly dead, in a kind of supernatural meat locker—we are shown an ornate, ruined movie theater, made entirely of wax. The audience, seen as glowing outlines, like angels at the matinee, fade away as the theater melts and collapses; strings soar on the soundtrack, until finally the space is empty, and more puddle than theater. It is a spectacular image, sad and beautiful and more than a little cheesy, at once an evocation of the destruction of cinema and a demonstration of its power.

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The “death of cinema” is at this point a well-worn cliche (which does not mean it isn’t true)—but it’s an unexpected one coming from Bi. “It’s a strange paradox,” the great film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote back in 2010, “that about half of my friends and colleagues think that we’re currently approaching the end of cinema as an art form and the end of film criticism as a serious activity, while the other half believe that we’re enjoying some form of exciting resurgence and renaissance in both areas.” He noted that “many of the naysayers tend to be people around my own age (sixty-six) or older, whereas many of the optimistic ones are a good deal younger, most of them under thirty.”

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Guo Yue as Yang Yang in Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues, 2015

Bi should, by all rights, be one of the optimists. He was barely in his twenties when Rosenbaum was writing, and that year, still in college, he made his first film, the ragged, dreamy short South. By the end of the decade he had released his extraordinary first two features—counted by many as among the best reasons for optimism about the artistic future of film. *Kaili Blues *(2015) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018) were not just great movies, they were great movies that could not have been made at any other point in the history of the medium. Both devoted their second halves to immense, intricate, discombobulating single-take shots. The one in *Kaili Blues *lasts forty-one minutes, during which the camera follows the main character on and off a motorcycle, back and forth across a river—and, seemingly, back in time, as a small town’s inhabitants reveal themselves as figures out of his past. The shot in Long Day’s Journey is even longer and more elaborate: the film retells its own plot over a full hour without a single cut, moving from a tunnel to a deserted roadway to an outdoor night-market and festival in an abandoned prison complex, making part of its journey by gondola. These sequences required lightweight, high-resolution digital cameras that had only recently been made widely available; their hypnotic, dilapidated Kaili landscapes showed that such cameras were now accessible even to an unknown director working on a tiny budget in southwest China, a thousand miles from Beijing. At one point during Long Day’s long take the camera lifts off and circles the action in a drone, then returns to its earthbound movements—a feat that would have been impossible, on any budget, just a few years earlier.

Even more, Bi seemed to represent an entirely new form of cinephilia, the product of an era when vast swathes of world cinema were suddenly available to anyone with a will and an Internet connection. It was impossible not to notice the vast range of influences on his work: A.S. Hamrah called Bi “a synthesist of all previous auteur cinema” and listed Marcel Carné, Alain Resnais, Andy Warhol, Andrei Tarkovsky, Theo Angelopoulos, Johnnie To, Quentin Tarantino, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul as predecessors for Long Day’s Journey; J. Hoberman, reviewing *Kaili Blues *in these pages, saw “Resnais and [Chris] Marker, but also Andrei Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, and David Lynch.” Somehow neither mentioned the great Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien, whose pool-hall lyricism is especially apparent in the second half of Long Day’s Journey, or the earlier long-take memory cinema of Alexander Sokurov, or Carlos Reygadas, or any number of others. Bi seemed somehow to emerge not from any single tradition or movement but from all of them at once.

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Tang Wei as Wan Qiwen and Yongzhong Chen as Zuo Hongyuan in Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, 2018

The baffling thing was that this hurricane of influence did, in fact, cohere. The films were unified, mysterious, commanding in their elliptical editing and bifurcated structures, dreamy tone and sensuous attention to texture and detail: true synthesis, not pastiche. Their least interesting aspect was, perhaps not surprisingly, their plots. Long Day’s Journey, especially, is at its core a quite familiar story: man meets woman, loses her, searches for her, while gangsters lurk. Its telling is extraordinary but the tale itself is, perhaps, a little secondhand.

*Resurrection *quadruples down on that kind of borrowing, with the sutures left far more visible. This can feel, at times, like a retreat. The mystifying unity of Bi’s earlier work is gone. But in its place is a new profusion: what holds the film together, beyond Yee’s presence, is Bi’s endless stylistic showboating, not an unfolding story but a tour of cinematic possibilities. Few movies, really, have ever had this much movie in them, stuffed full of what feels like every conceivable camera trick, trope, and stylistic flourish. The silent-film prologue alone uses forced perspective and miniature sets (occasionally rearranged before our eyes by giant hands reaching in from off-screen), painted backdrops, fades, irises, stop motion, and reverse motion. The color starts drab and limited, like colorized black-and-white footage, then breaks out into dazzling pseudo-Technicolor. The noir section is a delirious assemblage of canted angles, inky shadows, waterlogged streets, and portentous symbolism. Glass breaks luxuriously in scene after scene, including a shootout in a mirror shop lifted directly from The Lady from Shanghai. The mood is so thick the plot is barely comprehensible. (There’s a theremin involved, and a lot of Bach, and several characters go mad….)

Especially in the early sections, this razzle-dazzle wavers between fatiguing and delightful. The exact ratio probably depends on the individual viewer’s appetite for, say, a zoetrope interlude, or a scene in which the Deliriant and his hunter reenact the 1895 Lumière short L’Arroseur Arrosé. At times it can feel like being stuck next to a pair of giddy newlyweds: Bi and the movies, deaf to the world, cooing to each other in their own cine-love language.

Often, though, the giddiness is irresistible, genuinely dazzling. When the hunter first finds the Deliriant, he offers her a cake, decorated with flowers that continuously bloom and wither in a circle around its rim; the flowers are clearly stop motion, the rest of the shot is not. Such moments seem like a glimpse of the first spirit of cinema: a gift, an enchantment, the greatest trick yet. The Lumière recreation might feel a little silly, but its return about two hours later is far less so. Near the end of the New Year’s Eve story, the last section before the epilogue, the camera comes to rest in front of a window, looking out over an alleyway at night. Suddenly time speeds up. People start to fill the alleyway, zooming along in fast-forward, getting ready for a party and setting up a projector and a screen. The screen flickers to life, showing, yes, L’Arroseur Arrosé, this time for real. The short plays out in full, at normal speed, but the action around and in front of it continues in fast motion; the whole party forms, takes place, and breaks up over its forty-five seconds of action. Another of cinema’s great tricks, which Bi wants to be sure we appreciate: the way it can do more than just preserve and compress time, can bend and intermix it, set it off against itself. “For the Deliriant, a hundred years have passed,” the hunter reports late in the film, though for her—and for us—it has been “only two hours.”

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In the ghost story section, the film seems, for a little while, to move beyond time altogether. Yee plays a man known only as the “mongrel,” who is left by his work gang (we seem to be in the middle of the Cultural Revolution) to spend the night in an abandoned Buddhist temple. There he encounters a “spirit of bitterness” who has taken the form of his own dead father. They argue (“[My father] was never as crude as you,” the mongrel tells him, as the spirit spits and smokes a cigarette), then the mongrel agrees to perform a ritual to help the spirit achieve enlightenment, which would release him from his current existence.

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Shu Qi as the Big Other in Bi Gan’s Resurrection, 2025

Here the film slips into a hazy, day-for-night lyricism. The spirit draws the Chinese characters for “bitter” and “sweet” with his finger on an algae-covered pool of water as the mongrel hauls in pieces of wood and arranges them into those same characters. The images dissolve into each other, back and forth: small and large, writing and ritual collapsing together, just this side of abstraction. The soundtrack is dominated by rhythmic snoring—the mongrel’s memory of his father sleeping, ostensibly, but the effect is to push the scene further into an uncanny stillness, a plotless, hypnagogic non-time.

The spell breaks soon enough. The segment resolves abruptly and mysteriously, as ghost stories tend to do, and the next section is, for better and for worse, the film’s most conventional. In telling the story of a drifter cynically taking a young orphan under his wing, Bi seems to treat warm, straightforward narrative—or perhaps Eighties sentimentality—as its own style to be mimicked. It is the only section that establishes clear emotional stakes and develops them more or less how you’d expect, with relationships between characters that build scene by scene until they culminate in a revealing monologue or a gentle release of tears; the only section with something like a traditional beginning and ending. But in the hazy light that pervades many of the scenes, with its emphasis on reflections and wordless communication, hints of the earlier sections’ wooziness sneak back in.

Throughout the film Yee performs an assortment of morose and hard-bitten types—surprising in their diversity, given how narrow the range seems at first to be. Here, made up to be a decade or two older than his actual age of twenty-four, he lets the drifter’s mask of wary pragmatism slip just enough to show why a young orphan girl might make the mistake of trusting him, and to help the story’s downbeat humanism overcome its familiarity.

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Jackson Yee as the Deliriant in Bi Gan’s Resurrection, 2025

In the final section before the epilogue, Yee plays a very different kind of outcast: a gawky, youthful, bleach-blond punk, yearning for love and destruction with equal fervor and finding them both. It is New Year’s Eve, 1999, and he is unsure whether the world will even last till morning. Wandering the rainy, dimly lit streets of a Chinese port city, through windblown detritus, past streetwalkers, drug hawkers, and squabbling gangsters, he may not even want it to. All he really wants is to follow the strange, pretty girl he just met (Li Gengxi), who gave him an obviously fake name but seems to like him just the same.

The obvious touchstone is Hou’s Millennium Mambo (2001), another nocturnal tale of doomed love—starring, not at all coincidentally, Shu Qi. But the style Bi seems to be aping most directly here is his own: like the famous sequences in *Kaili Blues *and Long Day’s Journey into Night, this section of Resurrection is a single elaborate take, almost forty minutes long. The effect is a little more limited this time: the section is just one part among many, and a self-contained story instead of a reconfiguration of everything that’s gone before. It adds to the film, rather than transforming it entirely. (Bi has noted both that “we didn’t have many resources left” by the time they came to shoot this episode and that, after his previous films, “shooting a long take is no longer that much of a challenge.”) Its most surprising effects are local: the way the camera shifts from watching the action in close third person to assuming the point of view of one character, then another; the way its movement through indoor and outdoor spaces frames so many moments so carefully, as if by accident.

There are other aspects that make this section feel like a return to the style of his earlier work, especially Long Day’s Journey. Both focus on a forbidden romance with a mysterious woman who uses a pop star’s name as an alias; both are set at least in part around the turn of the millennium; both feature a sadistic, karaoke-singing gangster as the threat to the love story; both eventually turn into violent escape attempts. But where Long Day’s Journey is fragmented and mournful, its escape ending in failure and much of its runtime devoted to the man’s search, years later, for the woman he lost, Resurrection’s version is a headlong rush, unafraid of silliness. Its violence borders on slapstick, several characters are literal vampires, and its lovers, in the end, break free in a stolen boat.

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Li Gengxi as Tai Zhaomei in Bi Gan’s Resurrection, 2025

As they do, the sun peeks over the horizon. It is morning, the world hasn’t ended, and the immense single shot has, we suddenly realize, been timed to end with the dawn. It is, in a sense, the inverse of the effect achieved by the ghost story: not time suspended but time hurtling forward, exactly on cue. (This was the hidden function of the sped-up party sequence: to bridge the gap from night to morning, without making this section last for hours.) It’s the most stunning moment in Resurrection, and the oldest movie-making trick of all: the world itself, the simple miracle of light—the right light—hitting a camera.

*

In 2022 Bi released A Short Story, a strange, fifteen-minute fable about a talking cat, who spends most of the film wearing a hat and trench coat. (It was commissioned by a pet company as an ad, apparently, and was meant to be just three minutes long and shot in a few days—Bi ended up taking four months.) It was the first taste of the style he would adopt in Resurrection, with a similar use of silent-film trickery and stylistic collage. At one point the cat encounters a demon, played by Yongzhong Chen, who played the protagonist of Kaili Blues and returns as the spirit of bitterness in Resurrection. This demon declares himself “hungry for real magic,” which the cat—and the film—apparently can’t provide. But the shot in which he declares this is itself a dazzling display of cinema’s false magic, a seemingly simple depiction of a man in a room that turns out to have been filmed in reverse, its contents warped by a careful use of forced perspective.

In Long Day’s Journey a character says, “The difference between film and memory is that films are always false.” If that’s true, then films don’t need to bother about truth at all—they can embrace that falseness, revel in it. In which case the pastiche of Resurrection is a natural extension of Bi’s sensibility, and perhaps a fitting one for an Internet-era auteur. His work has always been driven by the way the real and the unreal, present and memory and myth bleed into one another, not just telling a story but retelling it, reconfiguring it, having his characters remember and forget it, puzzle it out. (“Memories mix truth and lies, they appear and vanish before our eyes,” that same character adds in Long Day’s Journey, as if describing the very film we are watching.)

It is easy to get lost in Resurrection’s swarming falsities, especially on first viewing. Its menagerie of styles, stories, symbols, references, and effects seems intentionally overwhelming—a rapturous, frustrating, exhausting experience. Its disparate stories are, ostensibly, all one—we are told from the beginning, and reminded by Shu Qi’s voiceover between each section, that every character Yee plays is a form of the Deliriant—but there is little evidence of this in the episodes themselves. The film’s credits also tie each section to a particular sense: sight for the prologue, then hearing, taste, smell, touch, and finally “mind” for the epilogue. This is clear for most of the stories (the noir is especially obsessed with ears and music, and tastes and smells are central to the plots of the next two), though the New Year’s Eve section seems to be “touch” more or less by default. But that the Deliriant is losing these senses as the film progresses, as Bi has said, seems not to have made it into the actual film; it is hard to see this arrangement as anything more than a formal device, one among many.

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Jackson Yee as the Deliriant in Bi Gan’s Resurrection, 2025

Still, if we take the film at its word and treat it as more than a brilliant variety show—if we assume that all Yee’s protagonists are a single character wandering through time and genre—what do we see? A whole lot of suffering, mainly. It is extraordinary how much physical punishment is heaped on this figure over the course of the film. He is drugged, bitten, imprisoned (twice), stabbed (twice), cut open (twice), immolated, beaten almost to death, convinced to knock out his own tooth with a piss-drenched rock, hung up by the heels and whipped. He is an outcast, a criminal, a loser; in the prologue people are literally getting high off his tears.

The Deliriant was introduced as a clear stand-in for movies as a whole, right down to the projector in his back—a “cinema monster,” as Bi has put it. If so, it is a very dark vision of cinema that is being presented here. It is an art form not just dying but tormented. If it is destined to be resurrected, as the title promises, it first must do its time on the cross.

And yet it might seem as if Resurrection wants to take a darker view than it actually does. A mournful note sounds only occasionally, mostly in the final sequence and in the voiceover interludes. More often the film is energetic, playful, vibrant in its stylistic metamorphoses; overwhelming, not overcome. If movies are dead, why does this one feel so alive? Amid all its flagrant pastichery, its insistence on the death of cinema can seem like just another borrowed gesture, another trope to be recycled and toyed with: there’s noir, there’s horror, there’s stop motion and the lost glory of the medium. Its lament is certainly more abstract, less directly personal than similar ones by older filmmakers; Bi’s melting movie theater is a representation, a symbol, not an actual abandoned place like those that punctuate Paul Schrader’s The Canyons (2013) or around which Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Pictures of Ghosts (2023) is centered. The eras to which it pays tribute largely passed before Bi was born. Film’s death, more than anything, seems to be taken for granted—sad, but not news.

This is perhaps why Resurrection feels so much more joyful than any other elegy for cinema I’ve seen. With film dead, maybe we simply have less to worry about: there’s nothing we need to do to keep it alive, no reason not to take whatever parts seem useful and use them however we want. Even the violence meted out to the various incarnations of Resurrection’s movie monster has a kind of glee to it as it accumulates, a satisfied sadism. If this is cine-love, then, it’s a kind of necrophilia: not, one assumes, what Sontag had in mind. But love nonetheless.