In a present where dreaming has become a suspicious act, an uncomfortable luxury, or simply an anomaly, Resurrection, the third film by Chinese director Bi Gan, stands as a radical gesture: a reclaiming of cinema as the language of dreams. Premiering in the Official Competition at Cannes 2025, the film completely abandons linear narrative to immerse itself in a sensory journey through time and the cinematic imaginary of the last century. Divided into five segments—a prologue and four dreamlike episodes—Resurrection unfolds as a collage that oscillates between melancholy and overflowing invention. Rather than following a conventional storyline, Bi Gan constructs a series of worlds in which cinema, as both cultural artifact and emotional device, becomes the true protagonist. Through its forms, styles, and genres, the film proposes a sensorial archaeology of the seventh art—a passage through its foundational moments, its mutations, and its unfulfilled promises.

The prologue, a silent 20-minute sequence, is already a manifesto in itself. Set in a dystopian world where “phantasmers” are hunted by enforcers, it presents a woman who locates one such dreamer in an opium den and, in an act of compassion, allows him to dream one last time. What follows is a kind of cinematic palimpsest, where the dreamer’s visions unfold as distorted, fragmented, and deeply emotional homages to different styles of 20th-century cinema. In the first dream, we witness a postwar noir tale, with an investigator lost in a senseless case, surrounded by mirrors and fragments of identity slipping away. The structure dissolves as the narrative progresses, and narrative logic gives way to a rarefied atmosphere where the visual dominates the plot. The use of sound, the repetition of a Bach melody, and echoes of expressionist cinema give this section a hypnotic quality, somewhere between delirium and memory.

The second episode transports the viewer to a snowy mountain, to a remote temple where a looter of religious art suffers from an unbearable toothache. There, physical pain gives rise to the appearance of a “bitterness spirit,” a being that seems drawn from folklore but also embodies the persistence of desire amid spiritual ruin. The spatial construction, deeply inspired by classical Japanese cinema, turns the temple’s architecture into a kind of visual score, where each shot reveals a symbolic dimension of memory and emptiness.

In the third dream, the tone shifts completely: the protagonist is now a street swindler during the golden age of Hong Kong cinema. With the help of a child with a gifted sense of smell, he plans a scam against a mafia boss. The frenetic rhythm, pop stylization, and the tragicomic tone recall an era when cinema wasn’t afraid to mix genres or push its boundaries toward farce or moral fable. Here, the swindler’s failure is just another variation on the theme of loss, but also a celebration of the vitality of a cinema that dared to play.

The final segment, set on the eve of the year 2000, closes the circle. A marginal couple wanders through a ghostly city in search of a dawn that may never come. The 35-minute long take that makes up this last stretch is less virtuosic than the one that closed Long Day’s Journey into Night, but no less moving. It’s a journey that retraces its own steps, finds echoes of the prologue, and culminates in a key image: a street projection of the first fiction film in history, the Lumière brothers’ L’Arroseur arrosé. In that moment, as the world around accelerates and the projection remains steady, Bi Gan not only cites the birth of cinema—he reanimates it, regenerates it.

The theatre in the final sequence, half-ruined, fills with figures that seem like ghosts. But they are not specters of the past, rather bodies ignited by the projection, illuminated by a light that endures even when nothing else remains. In its farewell, Resurrection affirms that as long as there are those who dream, as long as there are those who watch, cinema will not die. The dream goes on.