“Resurrection,” a magnificent intoxicant of a movie from the thirty-six-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan, is no ordinary love letter to cinema. It’s more like a love labyrinth—a multi-tiered maze, full of secret passages, shadowy rooms, and winding staircases, with a giant movie theatre, sculpted from candle wax, waiting at the incandescent finish. It’s an ecstatic, extravagant work of artifice and imagination, and, from the start, Bi and his collaborators (they include the director of photography Dong Jingsong and the production designers Liu Qiang and Tu Nan) embrace their craft with a childlike sense of wonder and play. An extended early shot, set in an opium den, practically overflows with intricate visual trickery—paper-cutout characters, an outsized hand that reaches into the frame and begins manipulating the scenery—that I could have happily watched unfold for hours. More than once in “Resurrection,” the precise mechanics of a sequence can prove confounding, but the meaning is utterly clear: cinema is both a toy to be played with and a canvas of unlimited possibilities.

And that’s just the labyrinth’s foyer. Bi will soon send us hurtling into the lower depths, as he springs one trapdoor after another. My advice is to surrender and enjoy the plunge. “Resurrection,” which Bi wrote with Zhai Xiaohui, is both an expansive work of cinematic fantasy and a condensed survey of cinema’s history; it consists of a prologue, an epilogue, and four chapters in between, each one set in a different time, place, and genre. The prologue is effectively a silent film, composed in a nearly square aspect ratio, structured with elegant intertitles, and possessed of an explicit homage to “L’Arroseur Arrosé,” Louis Lumière’s comic short from 1895. The deeper we go into the labyrinth, the more elusive—and allusive—it becomes. There is a poster of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Day of Wrath” (1943), a terrifying hall of mirrors straight out of Orson Welles’s “The Lady from Shanghai” (1947), and a gangster’s swimming pool that would look right at home in Brian De Palma’s “Scarface” (1983).

If one film seems to hover over the proceedings, it is Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982), which shares a similar flavor of bafflement and awe. Like Scott’s classic, “Resurrection” unfurls a melancholy, noirish science-fiction premise: “In a wild and brutal era,” the prologue’s opening titles declare, “humans have discovered that the secret to eternal life is to no longer dream!” But, although dreaming is forbidden, there exist a defiant few, called Deliriants, who continue to do so in secret. One Deliriant, we’re told, has “been hiding in an ancient, forgotten past. That is film!” The implicit connection between dreams and movies is thus made explicit from the start, and it becomes even clearer once we meet the Deliriant himself. A disfigured hunchback—played, under a heavy load of prosthetic makeup, by the twenty-five-year-old actor and singer Jackson Yee—he resembles several of early cinema’s fabled monsters: Max Schreck’s Nosferatu, or perhaps a Lon Chaney hybrid of Quasimodo and the Phantom of the Opera. (And also, of course, one of the persecuted replicants from “Blade Runner.”)

This Deliriant must be brought back to reality, a task that falls to a hunter called the Big Other. You may expect Jabba the Hutt, but no: the hunter is a lithe beauty, played by Shu Qi, whose mesmerizing, mostly wordless performances for the Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien—in films like “Three Times” (2006) and “The Assassin” (2015)—make her a natural for this silent-era opener. But the Deliriant isn’t easily tamed; he is, essentially, a drug addict, and he has the power to spread his affliction to others. After temporarily succumbing to one of his deeply seductive illusions, the Big Other urges him to stop dreaming. The Deliriant protests that he cannot, and begs her to “please kill me here and now.” I can imagine a few audience members echoing that sentiment on their way to the exits, put off by the mad conceptual ambition and otherworldly imagery of “Resurrection.” Their loss.

The Big Other grants the Deliriant’s death wish, but in her own way. Realizing that the hump on his back is an embedded movie projector, she loads the apparatus with a roll of film and begins to project, in essence, the very movie that we’re watching. There’s a paradoxical quality to this mercy killing: the unspooling reels will drain what remains of the Deliriant’s life force, but they will also “prolong his dream for a hundred years.” Again, the mechanics are confounding but the meanings are clear: essentially, Bi has devised an elaborate pretext for us to mourn the death of cinema by reliving, over a running time of about two hours and forty minutes, its century of glory. And even as the Deliriant gradually dies—cue time-lapse shots of candle wax, swiftly melting away—he is continually reborn, from one chapter to the next, each time assuming the form of a wandering soul on a strange, inscrutable mission.

The first of the four chapters is an oppressively gray-toned, narratively diffuse spy thriller, set amid the mists of what appears to be the Second World War. (With one exception, the script avoids referring to specific historical dates or events, almost certainly to gain the approval of Chinese censors.) A train rattles through a dark night, tight-jawed men stalk moodily about in fedoras, and, amid talk of air raids and glimpses of a bombed-out railway station, a hunt for a killer is under way. An investigator (Mark Chao) suspects that the culprit is the Deliriant, who has shed his monstrous shell to reveal the face and form of the young Yee—no less a vision of pop-idol beauty for being roughed up and stained with blood. More than any other chapter, this story shudders with violence, much of it in the form of noise: gunshots ring out, wails issue from a torture chamber, and the killer stabs his victims in their ears, flooding the soundtrack with a high-pitched ring. Is Bi commenting on the technological ruptures of the sound era? And what are we to make, then, of the MacGuffin-like role played by a theremin, an electronic instrument that generates music through seemingly invisible means? (In a word: cinema!)

The second chapter, also steeped in wintry monochrome, provides a ghost of an answer, even as it piles on more questions. A narrator (Shu) tells us that twenty years have passed, and the Deliriant, now a member of a workmen’s crew, is stranded one snowy night at an abandoned Buddhist temple. But he is less alone than he realizes, and, in time, he is visited by the Spirit of Bitterness (Chen Yongzhong), who, in an amusing twist, takes human form after being dislodged from a decaying tooth in the Deliriant’s mouth. The theme of this chapter, in other words, is taste, just as the theme of the previous chapter was hearing. A through line, at last! The senses are a structuring device; the Big Other is killing the Deliriant by draining his powers of perception, one by one.

It’s no surprise, then, to discover that the third story, set ten years later, is an olfactory affair. The Deliriant, now a sly grifter in a leather jacket, enlists an orphaned young girl (Guo Mucheng, a charmer) to perform a magic trick, in which she appears to guess playing cards using only her sense of smell. This chapter, slotting nicely into the grand tradition of movies about con artists and street urchins, is the most purely pleasurable section of “Resurrection” and also the richest. Even as the Deliriant and his pint-size accomplice attempt to hoodwink a monster, they’re left to wonder, poignantly, if anything in their duplicitous world is real. It’s a question that cuts to the heart of movie illusions—can a mirage ever attain substance, ever go beyond its surface dazzle to arrive at deeper, more lasting truths?—and it rebounds on “Resurrection” itself, the work of a brash young showman whom critics have at times credited with more ingenuity than profundity.

Bi was still in his twenties when he directed his first two features, “Kaili Blues” (2015) and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (2019), both partly set and shot in his home town of Kaili, in the southwestern Chinese province of Guizhou. Together, these announced him as a prodigiously gifted and audacious talent, bent on redefining how we experience the passage of time and the logic of dreams in a movie theatre. Both films also established his signature formal conceit: an unbroken, dazzlingly sustained travelling shot—forty-one minutes in “Kaili Blues,” nearly an hour in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”—in which a series of set pieces play out, with almost Rube Goldberg-like complexity and precision, under the scrutiny of one flowing camera movement.

Advances in filmmaking have made this kind of stunt easier to pull off than it was when Alexander Sokurov directed his one-take tour de force, “Russian Ark” (2002). In more recent years, the illusion of unbroken continuity—achieved not in-camera, but with much digital nipping and tucking—has become the dominant gimmick of Oscar-winning prestige dramas like “Birdman” (2014) and “1917” (2019). By contrast, Bi’s long takes never feel like slick pieces of engineering. The camera, quite palpably operated by human hands, floats along after the characters with a lightly jostling inelegance; it doesn’t seem to be pacing them so much as hanging out with them. In its more playful moments, the camera seems to cross the threshold between different time frames, or to drift in and out of a character’s consciousness with a mad metaphysical bravura.

There is a one-take wonder in “Resurrection,” too; it constitutes the film’s fourth chapter, runs about thirty-six minutes, and unfolds on the night of December 31, 1999—the film’s one specific temporal marker. The air is thick with fin-de-siècle celebration and Y2K anxiety. As flares light up the sky, the Deliriant, now a blond hooligan, roams the streets of a port city with Tai Zhaomei (Li Gengxi), a singer and gangster’s moll. “I’ve never bitten anyone,” she says, cryptically revealing Bi’s latest choice of genre. “I’ve never kissed anyone,” he replies. The camera drifts before, after, and around the characters, following them along the docks, through a crowded karaoke club, into a startlingly violent confrontation with a crime boss (Huang Jue), and, finally, onto a floating boat, where it abandons them, at the break of a new dawn.

The extreme length of this single take reminds us what inexpensive, lightweight digital cameras can accomplish in the modern age—technically speaking, they can keep a movie going on forever. But Bi doesn’t equate the unlimited duration of a shot with the eternal life of a medium; in the logic of the film, the long take is a final, indulgent expenditure of energy, one that risks finishing the Deliriant off at last. “Time is running out,” the narrator ominously intones, but the gaspingly beautiful final moments of “Resurrection” feel like the opposite of cinematic defeat. Arriving at a moment when the movies have seldom felt more finite or more vulnerable, as an industry or as a medium, this astonishing work insists—in its title, and in the heroic force of Bi’s artistry and ambition—that every end really is a new beginning. ♦