Dreams can get you in deep trouble in this boldly visual Chinese ode to the cinematic experience
Resurrection
Starring Jackson Yee, Shu Qi & Gengxi Li
Directed by Bi Gan
Rated R
In theaters Friday, Jan. 22.
(Chinese, subtitled in English)
This hypnotically existential, boldly baroque sci-fi ode to cinema is set in a parallel world where people have stopped dreaming in exchange for immortality, like how a candle can “live” forever if it’s never set afire.
Dreaming, we’re told, is bad; it burns up your life with unreal nonsense. And dreamers (called Deliriants) are hunted down, tortured and dispatched by “seekers” who can see through their worlds of illusion. The Deliriants opt to live in the escapism of fantasy, memory and hope instead of the bleak, often painful real world. Sometimes they even watch movies, which is also considered a subversive activity.
We follow one Deliriant (Jackson Yee) after a seeker (Shu Qi) apprehends him, replacing his heart with a projector and a reel of film that lets her watch his subconscious like a movie on a screen. (You don’t get that with your Regal Club Card.) She grants him a few more dreams before sending him on to the great beyond. She wants to see what makes this dreamer tick.
We get to watch, too, as the dreamer goes on a bonkers surrealistic tour of experiences unhinged from time and space—as an opium-addicted ogre, an accused murderer, a worker breaking down an ancient temple, a con man trying to shamboozle an aging gangster, a street-smart slum hood cavorting alongside a fellow Y2K reveler (Gengxi Li) with a dark secret.
Yee, a former boy-band member, plays every part “dreamed” by his character. It’s a performance that puts the “wide” in wide-ranging. And director Bi Gan masterfully unspools the story with salutes to other filmmakers and classic movies, from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Conrad Veidt in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, to the film noir of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and the body horrors of director David Cronenberg.
Resurrection puts a lot on the screen to ponder and gives viewers two hours and 40 minutes to do it. It’s an immersive, hyper-visual, wildly imaginative arthouse-movie experience, suggesting—among other things—that watching a film is a lot like dreaming, seeing into other worlds, viewing experiences that aren’t our own. Perhaps life itself, our existence, is merely another illusion, a movie of the mind. And what happens when that movie ends?
There’s a maze of labyrinthine alleyways, a house of mirrors, lots of fog and cigarette smoke, a suitcase with a musical instrument that drives people mad, a vampire and an encounter with The Spirit of Bitterness, who wonders what sin tastes like. Each of the dreamer’s five vignettes hinge on one of the five senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. And even in dreams, we learn, farts are funny.
As one character tells us toward the end, in a karaoke bar, you might live forever, but still not get the answers to life’s many riddles. You certainly won’t get all the answers, either, after nearly three hours of Resurrection, but golly gee, you’ll get one helluva mind-blowing ride.
—Neil Pond
The Media Tourist 