Resurrection

From the visionary director, Bi Gan. In a society where people stop dreaming to extend their lifespan, some dangerous individuals still dream, warping the fabric of time. We experience five dreams, for each of the senses, each chronologically representing a period of cinema.

Review from The Guardian

Bi Gan’s new movie is bold and ambitious, visually amazing, trippy and woozy in its embrace of hallucination and the heightened meaning of the unreal and the dreamlike. His last film Long Day’s Journey Into Night from 2018 was an extraordinary and almost extraterrestrial experience in the cinema which challenged the audience to examine what they thought about time and memory; this doesn’t have quite that power, being effectively a portmanteau movie, some of whose sections are better than others – though it climaxes with some gasp-inducing images and tracking shots and all the constituent parts contribute to the film’s aggregate effect.

Resurrection is, perhaps, a long night’s journey to the enlightenment of daybreak; it finishes at a club called the Sunrise. It is also an episodic journey through Chinese history, finishing at that historic moment which continues to fascinate Chinese film-makers whose movies are a way of collectively processing their feelings about it: New Year’s Eve 1999, the new century in which China was to bullishly embrace the new capitalism while cleaving to the political conformism of the old ways.

We are in a kind of alt-reality universe where humans have discovered they can live indefinitely if they do not dream, an activity which burns up humans like a lit candle. Bi Gan leaves it up to us to ponder what that implies for overpopulation. But there is one outlier, one dissident, a man who does dream – he is a sacred monster called the Fantasmer (Jackson Yee) and the paradox is that the Fantasmer’s ecstatic perception of illusions and dreams allows him to reincarnate and resurrect in an exotic variety of lowlife existences at different historic times in the last century – and a woman enters his life. Is it the woman perceiving these events, or is the Fantasmer doing it?

Read the rest of the review from Peter Bradshaw here...