Resurrection
Entry updated 29 May 2026. Tagged: Film.
Chinese film (2025; original title Kuang ye shi dai ["Wild Times"]; the English title Resurrection appears on screen). Huace Pictures, Dangmai Films, CG Cinéma, Arte France Cinéma, Obluda Films. Directed by Bi Gan. Written by Bi Gan and Zhai Xiaohui. Cast includes Mark Chao, Li Gengxi, Shu Qi and Jackson Yee. 159 minutes. Colour.
At the end of the twenty-first century, humanity has discovered that the secret of longer life is to give up dreaming. Those who refuse to stop dreaming even though it will kill them are known as "Deliriants", and are hunted as dangerous dissidents by specialist detectives. One Deliriant (Yee) has found a way to enter into films being projected at a cinema, where he is found by the woman (Shu) who is tracking him, as he desperately consumes opium to fuel his dreams. Attempting to understand his compulsion to dream, she loads a projector with film onto which the Deliriant replays four of his past lives
In the first, under the name Qiu he himself hunting a dissident musician, who becomes infatuated with Qiu's voice. Tragedy ensues for all. In the second section, he is a monk who leads looters to an abandoned monastery, where he accidentally destroys a statue of the Buddha, releasing a spirit from whom he seeks absolution for the mercy killing of his father. Following this, he is incarnated (or dreams he is incarnated) as a petty con-man, Jia, who tricks a rich gangster with a young girl who pretends she can read cards, even when burned, by smell. The gangster is eventually revealed to be searching for the message in a burned letter left by his dead daughter. In the final dream, set at the turn of the millennium in 1999, the Deliriant is Apollo, who falls for a Vampire (Li), who is forced to supply blood to an undead crime lord. She infects Apollo, with his consent, and they run away together just before the sun rises. After viewing the dreams, the detective understands his compulsion, and attempts to communicate with him before interring him in a vault where he cannot influence non-dreamers.
The nominal future setting of this long, complex, enigmatic film is simply a hook on which to hang a number of stories of varied styles, each of which corresponds to one of the senses of Buddhist thought, revolving around sight (the cinema), hearing (music), taste (the spirit's instructions to the monk involve identifying a bitter stone), smell (the burned cards and letters), touch (vampirism), and mind (the woman's final attempts at communication). In addition, it is a potted history of Cinema, each section being shot to evoke different periods and styles of film history, and an oblique look at the history of China through various periods. Appropriately for a film in which dreaming is such a central theme, precise meanings remain tantalizingly out of reach, and the narrative is by no means straightforward to follow, its enigma extending to the title, since reincarnation would seem more apposite than resurrection. It is always remarkably beautiful, never more so than the silent film-era inspired opening sequences which nod to the surrealist fantasias of animators such as Lotte Reiniger, Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay as well as Fritz Lang's more oneiric epics.
Remarkably for such a seemingly non-commercial film, Resurrection topped the box office in China. It also won a special award at the Cannes Film Festival. [CWa]
links
previous versions of this entry