Movie · 2025 · Science Fiction, Drama · 2h 39m · NR · Chinese
Curator score: 8.7/10 (67.9K ratings)
What is it that, once lost, you can never get back?
Overview
In a future where humanity has surrendered its ability to dream in exchange for immortality, an outcast finds illusion, nightmarish visions, and beauty in an intoxicating world of his own making.
Ratings
Curator score: 8.7/10
IMDb: 7.3/10
Letterboxd: 4.05/5
Metacritic: 86
TMDB: 7.3/10
Director
Bi Gan
Production
Dangmai Films 荡麦影业, Huace Media, Maoyan Entertainment, Daxi Culture Media, Poly Film Investment, Muxin Culture Communication
Cast
Jackson Yee, Shu Qi, Mark Chao, Li Gengxi, Huang Jue, Chen Yongzhong, Zhang Zhijian, Chloe Maayan, Nan Yan, Guo Mucheng
Curator Review
Verdict
A bold, shape-shifting science-fiction meditation on dreaming, mortality, and the history of cinema. It sounds dazzling, difficult, and occasionally messy, but the craft and ambition make it a major watch for viewers who want films that feel like an event.
Best for
viewers who love formally adventurous sci-fi
fans of dream logic and visual experimentation
cinephiles interested in film history and cinematic language
audiences open to elliptical, nontraditional storytelling
Skip if
you want a straightforward plot
you dislike ambiguity or symbolic storytelling
you prefer grounded realism over stylized imagery
you get impatient with long, chaptered, essayistic films
Overview
Resurrection is the kind of film that treats cinema as both archaeology and prophecy. Its future world premise is only the doorway into something much larger: a meditation on what it means to dream, to remember, and to remain human when experience itself has been commodified or surrendered.
Worth noting
Bi Gan appears to build the film as a sequence of formal transformations, moving through silent-expressionist textures, noir shadows, melodrama, and a bravura extended passage that seems designed to remind you how elastic movies can be. The result is less a conventional narrative than a cascade of images, moods, and ideas that keep reconfiguring themselves.
Bottom line
It may not fully cohere for every viewer, and some of its thematic weight is carried more by sensation than by argument. But for anyone drawn to cinema that feels handcrafted, haunted, and intellectually alive, this is a strikingly original work with real emotional and visual force.
Top Letterboxd reviews
davidehrlich (4★) · 4042 likes
few filmmakers more spectacularly exult in the fact that cinema is still in its infancy, but if you told me this was the last movie anyone would ever make that would also make perfect sense.
Jeff Zhang (5★) · 2732 likes
Better to be a corpse and dream than to live forever and not. And movies are how we dream. Bi Gan’s behemoth is an ode to the artform and a lamentation of our times, carving a path through image-making history. Real poetry.
Framesofnick (5★) · 1992 likes
I exist. I must dream. I must love. I must fight. I must hurt. I must see. I must live. I must die.
My favorite ending to a story in years, I will be thinking about you until I no longer can.
Jared Gilman (5★) · 1794 likes
how did he do that
Jomari Bashin (5★) · 1388 likes
Cinema continues to amaze me. Just when I think I’ve seen everything a film has to offer, a film like this comes along and surprises me with its boldness, its innovation, and the shocks it delivers through purely cinematic means. This film contains many things I’ve never encountered before: images and techniques that feel entirely new, as if someone is stretching cinema’s skin from the inside. Watching it was an experience unlike any other, much like the journey of one… more Cinema continues to amaze me. Just when I think I’ve seen everything a film has to offer, a film like this comes along and surprises me with its boldness, its innovation, and the shocks it delivers through purely cinematic means. This film contains many things I’ve never encountered before: images and techniques that feel entirely new, as if someone is stretching cinema’s skin from the inside. Watching it was an experience unlike any other, much like the journey of one… more