Curator Watchlist
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.
Where to watch: Buy
Sat · 2h 39m
Director: Bi Gan
Starring: Jackson Yee, Shu Qi, Mark Chao
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.
Bi Gan
Jackson Yee, Shu Qi, Mark Chao
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
A landmark of metaphysical science fiction that turns cosmic speculation into pure visual experience.
For its hypnotic pacing, philosophical mystery, and sense of entering a zone where reality becomes symbolic.
A profound sci-fi drama about memory, grief, and the limits of human understanding.
Shares the same spiritual ambition and willingness to move from intimate feeling to cosmic scale.
For viewers drawn to dream logic, identity fracture, and cinema that operates like a haunted puzzle.
A romantic, metaphysical meditation on love, death, and transcendence across shifting forms.
An essential reference point for memory, repetition, and the seductions of ambiguity.
A rigorous, enigmatic study of identity and the instability of the self.
Not for plot similarity, but for its mournful scale and its sense of lives suspended in a larger, indifferent world.
For its long-view emotional architecture and its interest in time as a force that reshapes identity.
A science-fiction drama that links love, belief, and metaphysical longing through a reflective tone.
For its ethereal mood, spiritual uncertainty, and fascination with unseen connections.
dreams and dreaming, immortality, mortality, cinema as art form, memory and loss, illusion and reality, humanity and technology, mythic storytelling
science fiction, art-house, surreal, dreamlike, meditative, experimental, philosophical, cinematic homage, existential, visually sumptuous