Resurrection (Kuang ye shi dai)

 

Director Bi Gan 

director and cast on the red carpet at Cannes

Shu Qi at Cannes, 2025

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RESURRECTION (Kuang ye shi dai)                       B+                                                       China  France  USA  (160 mi)  2025  d: Bi Gan

Unlike any other film you’ll ever see, a radical departure from any other cinema experience, Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan, the maker of such extraordinary films as 2016 Top Ten List #2 Kaili Blues (Lu bian ye can) and 2019 Top Ten List #6 Long Day's Journey Into Night (Di qiu zui hou de ye wan), has been described by Canadian writer, critic, and Chinese film curator Shelly Kraicer, who lived in Beijing for more than a decade, as the anti-Jia Zhangke ('Resurrection' review by Shelly Kraicer), now moving in a completely new direction, more modernist, with a stream-of-consciousness spirit, as movie references abound, becoming an ode to cinema and a lamentation for our times, creating an imaginary sci-fi universe that lives only in the imagination, which becomes the beating heart that lives within us, coinciding with the life of dreams, which cease to exist when the body dies.  But new life emerges with every subsequent conscious existence, allowing the life cycle to begin again with a true out-of-body experience.  Seemingly inspired by the darkly immersive atmospheric tone of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), writer/director Bi Gan and co-writer Zhai Xiaohui spent years in the lab constructing a new cinematic vision for this film, which was literally years in the making, as his last feature was seven years ago, but this nearly three-hour venture is a different kind of cinematic excursion that requires an open mind, as it simply resists logical evaluation and sets itself apart from the rest, like a time-traveling experience existing almost entirely in dream language.  A late edition to the Cannes lineup in 2025, added just five days before the festival began, winning a Special Grand Jury Prize, where jury president Juliette Binoche likened it to an “unidentified flying object,” the film has been re-edited since that initial premiere, yet it remains confusing enough, where it will be difficult for anyone to make sense of this sprawling epic work that simply goes places we’ve never been, yet the acclaim for this film will likely only grow over time.  Unraveling over the course of 100 years, like an anthology of short stories without chapter headings, told in six segments, with each one corresponding to one of the six senses recognized in Buddhist thought (The Six Sense Bases), sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and mind, where the protagonist in each segment is Jackson Yee, a Chinese actor, singer, and member of boy group TFBoys, who takes on five different roles, working with the director for a year and a half to make this film.  While there are multiple movie references, which the director takes in new directions, it’s difficult to say where this stands in Chinese movie history, as it’s remarkably ambitious visually, creating something onscreen that is simply unimaginable, yet it remains distanced and aloof, only occasionally connecting emotionally, leaving viewers befuddled and perplexed at the audaciousness of what they’ve just experienced.  Ultimately the film is something of a puzzlebox that the director himself wanted to watch, which makes perfect sense.      

Title cards explain that the film is set in a post-apocalyptic future when humanity has achieved immortality, but only by giving up dreaming, while those that continue to dream are called Deliriants, outcasts viewed as monsters that are knowingly veering towards their own death, living on a different level of human existence from the others, supposedly “bringing pain to reality and chaos to history.”  Using narratives that transcend space and time, moving from Silent-era German Expressionism to film noir to a Chinese ghost story to a phantastical vampire love story, shot by Dong Jingsong through various color filters, the film utilizes a film-within-a-film technique, opening in a silent movie theater, where film is considered part of an ancient forgotten past, with Bi Gan’s film dealing with the resurrection of dreams, of cinema, and of memory itself.  We discover a woman known as the Big Other, Shu Qi from Hou Hsiao-hsien’s MILLENNIUM MAMBO (2001),  THREE TIMES (2005), and 2015 Top Ten List #9 The Assassin (Nie Yinniang), who is capable of seeing through illusions, and is assigned to bringing Deliriants back to reality, sent to hunt them down, just like the hunt for Replicants in Blade Runner, gifted with the rare power to perceive these illusions for what they truly are, as she chooses to enter the monster’s dreams, determined to uncover the truth that lies hidden within.  Starting in an old Chinese opium den, elaborately constructed, like a dollhouse, featuring a multi-level space with adjoining rooms, windows, and walkways, each rendering a different activity, Resurrection (2025) Dir. Bi Gan : r/CineShots YouTube (46 seconds), but occasionally an outsized human hand intercedes, as she follows a secret underground passageway, like falling down an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole, where she discovers a grotesque Nosferatu-resembling Deliriant (Jackson Yee) munching on raw poppy flowers to help stimulate his dreams, but they are killing him.  Unable to understand his irrational compulsion, she discovers a movie projector for a heart, and decides to load it with film, allowing him to replay his past life in dreams before dying, as a series of four elaborately constructed dreams (framed by a prologue and epilogue) unfold before our eyes, with a brief shot of a wax candle melting and Shu Qi’s voiceover coming between each section, chronologically representing an unnamed historical period and a different period of cinema, which acts like a portal into the world of the subconscious imagination, taking us upon a shape-shifting odyssey through illusion, beauty, and terror that takes him across a century of cinema and to the end of time.

What stands out in all three Bi Gan films is the complex visual style, each featuring extended one-shot takes that extend beyond 30-minutes, become a signature aspect of his filmmaking, which is never less than enthralling, arguably a natural extension from the seductive, all-consuming style that began with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s neon-splashed, adrenaline-rush submersion into the techno-scored nightlife of Taipei in MILLENNIUM MAMBO, connected, of course, by actress Shu Qi.  Tinged with science fiction and fantasy, with a layered synthesized soundtrack by French electro-duo M83, while paying tribute to various movie genres, it’s important to note that in every iteration, the character Jackson Yee portrays is an outlaw, with a dream sequence moving into the lead-up of WWII and film noir territory, shot using a blue color filter or featuring the pervasive use of the color, where he appears to be a musician/spy suspect/political prisoner who is both reviled and revered because of his voice, capable of inducing madness in men, a homoerotic object of desire for both the Composer (Yan Nan) and the Commander (Mark Chao), one wanting to hear his voice, while the other wants to unlock his precious secrets, FNC 2025 | Resurrection (Bi Gan) (51 seconds).  Nearly indecipherable, this mysterious segment involves a fleeting reference to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s DAY OF WRATH (1943), an elaborate prison, a lengthy interrogation, a near-death train incident, a missing suitcase, a theremin, an Orson Welles’ LADY OF SHANGHAI (1947) house of mirrors, a panicked train station engulfed in fog, the stabbing of eardrums, and the last sounds heard, the warbling sounds of a Bach song, BWV 478, “Come, sweet death, come, blessed rest” played on a theremin which magically closes one world while opening another.  That song foreshadows a series of deaths that are yet to come.  The next sequence jumps ahead to the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960’s, a winter’s tale with snow inexplicably covering the ground of an abandoned Buddhist monastery, where a former monk, known as Mongrel, goes on a looting spree of locating Buddha statues before destroying them, all part of destroying the old ways, yet succumbing to a fever-inducing toothache, using a broken piece to knock out his rotten tooth, inducing the “Spirit of Bitterness,” who takes human form (Bi’s uncle, Chen Yongzhong, appearing in all his films).  The two engage in witty banter before the spirit, assuming the appearance of his late father, transports us into his dreamworld, reflective of a Chinese ghost story, revealing a mysterious backstory, offering a window into China’s dark past, where a dog reflects the karmic punishment for betraying the past, with Mongrel quickly realizing the past cannot be destroyed, as it exists in our minds and imagination.

Jia is a con artist during the onset of China’s market economy in the 80’s, who schemes to win prize money offered by an Old Man crime boss (Zhang Zhijian) who executes people who cross him.  In a world ruled by money, Jia befriends an orphan (Guo Mucheng), teaching her a card trick, hoping to convince the Old Man in the supernatural, or that she can identify a card simply by smelling it.  Posing as Jia’s daughter, even while blindfolded and wired to a lie detector machine, she manages to outwit the Old Man and win a cash prize, which they split before Jia leaves town and is immediately robbed and left for dead.  Meanwhile, the Old Man summons the girl for his real purpose, having abandoned his own daughter years ago, but longs to read a burnt out letter she wrote before she died in a fire.  Using the power of smell, she surprises us all by reading aloud the full contents of the letter written to an absent father.  In what is arguably the most elaborately staged segment, the pièce de résistance is a nearly forty-minute single-take tale that begins with a fireworks sequence, shot with breathtaking technical brilliance, mostly through a red color filter of rainy streets and smoky nightclubs, set during a millennium celebration on New Year’s Eve in 1999, as the Deliriant is reborn as Apollo, a reckless young hoodlum who has never been kissed, but is unfazed watching someone get strung up near the docks, yet when he meets a free-spirited young girl Tai Zhaomei (Li Gengxi), who may be a vampire but has never bitten anyone, his fortunes turn, no longer feeling alone.  As they run through abandoned buildings and back alleyways like the young kids in Godard’s ode to youth, Band of Outsiders (Bande à Part) (1964), caught up in a world of dream and reality, this becomes an evocation of youthful hope and joy at the dawn of the new millennium.  But there’s a catch, as she works for a mob boss, Mr. Lu (Huang Jue), feeding on blood that he supplies from his victims, turning into an eerie vampire love story, including an astonishing nightclub sequence, Resurrection (2025) - Nightclub Karaoke Scene YouTube (9:18), with its constantly moving camera, where Apollo gets the snot kicked out of him, but he perseveres, using a time-lapse technique to go from night to the next morning, yet just when they think they can escape it all, kissing passionately on a barge right out of Vigo’s L'Atalante (1934) in the moments before sunrise, their own combustible passion self destructs, effectively ending their dream.  In an epilogue, Shu Qi’s Big Other wraps things up, dressing up Apollo to resemble the original Deliriant, setting his corpse free in a gigantic vault filled with liquid, Resurrection 2025 Movie Ending Scene YouTube (2:16), returning us back to the wax movie theater filled with illuminated patrons, but one by one, each light goes out until only darkness remains, as the film ends with the theater, like time itself, melting away.  Yet if this film proves anything, it is that dreams, or inner freedom, is the one thing that cannot be controlled by outside forces.  

Evil Does Not Exist (Aku wa sonzai shinai)

 

Director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

Hamaguchi with Eiko Ishibashi

EVIL DOES NOT EXIST (Aku wa sonzai shinai)    B+                                                       Japan  (105 mi)  2023  d: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize (2nd Place) at the Venice Film Festival, where it also won a FIPRESCI Prize, and also Best Film at the London Festival, this is a peacefully contemplative film about the toxic human footprint left behind in the natural world, resulting in unintended consequences, becoming a parable about the balance of nature.  Shot in the mountainous region of Nagano, Japan, site of the 1998 Winter Olympics, this is that rare Japanese film where the distant mountains looming in the background overshadow the human presence, formed millions of years ago, as nature literally dwarfs the existence of mankind.  Hamaguchi has become one of more consistently fascinating and artistically daring new directors working today, where his films are absolutely precise, and are the reason we go to the theaters, starting out making a trilogy of low-budget documentaries on the lives of those who were affected by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster which caused more than 10,000 deaths, the worst in Japanese history, where the collective consciousness of the nation was literally left numb from the trauma.  He then expanded into some of the more innovative arthouse features of the last decade, 2017 Top Ten List #1 Happy Hour (Happî Awâ) (2015), a sprawling yet intimate five-hour film about four women in their mid-30’s whose lives are upended by a series of personal struggles, Asako I & II (Netemo sametemo) (2018), an eerie yet touching love story, 2021 #10 Film of the Year Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Gûzen to sôzô), an anthology of three short films dealing broadly with themes of love and loss, and finally his most acclaimed work, winning the Academy Award for Best International Film, 2022 Top Ten List #1 Drive My Car (Oraibu mai kâ), an elegiac film about love and mourning.  Working again with musical composer Eiko Ishibashi, who scored Hamaguchi’s last film, this couldn’t be more radically different, as it was originally conceived as a live orchestration, with Ishibashi asking the director to provide silent video footage to play during her performance, weaving together a mosaic-like integration of sound and image, where it was first intended to be a 30-minute short, but expanded into the hour-long film GIFT (2024).  Having lived entirely in urban environments, Hamaguchi visited Ishibashi at her studio in the countryside and was struck by the sweeping landscapes and how nature flows through the community, becoming the inspiration behind the film, shot near the area where she lives, with Hamaguchi adding dialogue and turning this into a highly concentrated film that thinks and encourages reflection.  Having been taught by filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa in graduate school, Hamaguchi was struck by how his films, especially in the 90’s when he was most prolific, had very unclear endings or were left unresolved, yet left a deep impact on viewers.  In a choice follow-up to Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023), Hamaguchi revisits the Japanese concept of Komorebi, the shadowplay of sunlight through the leaves, opening and closing the film with long, wordless tracking shots of the camera gazing up into the wintry canopy of trees high above in a style resembling the spatial, three-dimensional aesthetic of a 3D camera, where it feels like the camera is literally floating in air.  Visually this feels like an overt reference to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s VAMPYR (1932) where the protagonist is awake to witness his own burial, cognizant of all he sees, with the camera providing his viewpoint looking up while lying inside his coffin, placed on a horse-drawn cart on the ride to the cemetery, seeing the leaves of trees overhead.  That film was also shot as a silent film, but utilizes basic elements of sound.  The film reflects the Chinese principle of Yin and Yang that presupposes an existential perfection carried exactly by two poles, light and dark, where one cannot exist without the other.  Shot by Yoshio Kitagawa, accompanied by the calm yet richly textured music by Ishibashi that slowly grows more dissonant, Hamaguchi creates a meditative montage that is fully immersed in the surrounding natural world, where the simple everyday life is not easy, having to work hard for basic necessities, finding poetry on a small scale, trying to get the maximum out of slowly accumulating atmosphere, with long settings, crisp pictures, and above all, silence. 

Set in Harasawa, a fictional village in the idyllic quiet of the woods with a few thousand inhabitants, it resembles an Eden-like existence or eco-paradise, where the slow-moving film exudes a meditative calm, allowing viewers to identify with an established rhythm of life, yet the title alone exudes a sense of dread and foreboding, suggesting something terrible is about to happen.  The tranquility of the remote region is quickly established in the slow, near wordless immersion of outdoor scenes, as 8-year-old Hana (Ryô Nishikawa) is seen cheerfully playing alone in the snow while her more industrious father, Takumi (Hitoshi Omika, an assistant director from an earlier film, also a driver on the set), is noisily working with a chainsaw to cut large chunks of firewood, which he then chops into smaller pieces with an axe, collecting them into a wheelbarrow before stacking them in a woodpile next to an alpine chalet.  Smoke can be seen coming out of the chimney from a wood-burning stove keeping the interior warm.  The first spoken words come more than ten minutes into the film as Takumi, a taciturn handyman in the village, is seen gathering fresh spring water, placing them into large containers, where he and his friend Kazuo (Hiroyuki Miura) haul them up to his truck for use in an udon noodle shop, claiming the soba noodles taste so much better when boiled in spring water.  But he’s struck by the discovery of a patch of wild wasabi growing alongside the path, where the pungent taste is a welcome addition to evening meals.  This secluded routine of harmony and peace is upended by the announcement that Playmode, a Tokyo corporation, has recently purchased centrally located real estate with the intention of turning the grounds into high-end glamping campsites, luring rich city folk to seek refuge of a pristine natural environment that may end up upsetting the natural ecological balance of the region.  Guided by an impromptu town hall presentation from Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani), improbable spokespersons who are actually hired from a talent agency, the locals immediately spot problems in their proposal, rushing the plans of construction with a use it or lose it push to beat expiring Covid-relief subsidies, poking holes in their promise to deliver economic benefits, only to be met with some shameful corporate stonewalling, offering little more than empty platitudes as all their worst fears are confirmed.  In a collision of two entirely different worlds, Playmode has no idea about the fragile ecosystem that currently exists, discovering the plot of land they’ve chosen is on a deer trail, yet they intend to forge ahead anyway and bulldoze the land for their project, introducing septic tank sewage systems that will contaminate the freshwater springs, which they’re not concerned about, thinking the damage will be minimal.  Residents implore them to understand how damage introduced upstream makes its way to residents downstream, and may be irreversible.  While there are a variety of points of view in this culture clash, including the risk of fires and disturbing the migration patterns of wildlife, most are expressed in a calm, rational manner, with the residents offering intelligent reasons why they have chosen to live there, as it offers benefits that don’t exist in the big cities.  They don’t want to see that lost in a capitalist zeal for quick profits, sweeping aside local input while prioritizing what’s convenient for urban people, as the pollutant damage could affect generations long afterwards.  In an exaggerated sense, these are good versus evil arguments, where Japan, perhaps more than any other nation, has been cognizant of ecological impact, as they’re the only country on earth to have survived the deadly radiation effects of a nuclear blast, and the catastrophic effects were horrific.  Seeing the modern world encroaching on the natural is a theme many fans of Miyazaki and Ghibli Studio will recognize.  What’s cleverly revealed is the new corporate face of evil hides behind a subterfuge of lies and deceit, making promises they can’t keep, hiding behind an illusion of community spirit and good faith, pretending the feedback elicited will actually change their plans in the future, yet all that really matters is good old-fashioned greed.     

Politeness is an ingrained cultural aspect of Japanese society, yet this is an angry film, one that suggests the future is bleak, where the placid surface hides the boiling resentment bubbling below, like a volcanic force to be reckoned with that no one ever sees, but can erupt at any moment.  Traditional filmmaking does not look like this, where Hamaguchi refuses to repeat himself and is constantly challenged to seek new directions.  While the driving force behind the film is actually the ambient score by Eiko Ishibashi, Hamaguchi seamlessly recontextualizes the music and GIFT into a final version of what is clearly an art film, which is not for everyone, and should not be evaluated like any other movie, as it’s difficult to grasp how tireless yet aesthetically demanding the director is in presenting the story.  Without political moralizing, the film is not a didactic plea for environmental protection like Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves (2013), but is instead a supposition, an interpretation, suggesting nothing in nature is evil, while shades of good and evil exist in the humanity of mankind, with the film setting a philosophical-ethical equation, delving into questions of morality and guilt, and how innocence can also become guilty without the dark force of evil intruding.  With precise shots, Hamaguchi creates a quiet, slightly threatening mood, creating an abrupt yet beguiling ending that is completely unexpected, and not altogether comprehensible, where certainly part of the allure is you don’t really need to understand to appreciate the beauty of it, where the last 5-minutes are simply mesmerizing.  Even the director has acknowledged that he still wasn’t sure what the film meant to him.  This is a challenge of a different order where viewers need to realize just how unlike this is from other films, a metaphorical exercise where the enigmatic finale has confounded audiences and left them mystified, as the bizarre events seen happening onscreen are simultaneously blended with a recollection of what happened previously, all taking place in the imagination, so you not only wonder what it all means, but you also wonder what the hell just happened, as it’s specifically designed so you can’t really tell what’s going on.  Shot in a fog-like mist, growing mythical to the core, sinister gunshots can be heard echoing from the forest, suggesting hunters are nearby, yet this turns into a dreamlike landscape that is utterly perplexing, a strange twist of fate that may actually play out exclusively on a subconscious level, perhaps entering the psychological mindset of a wounded animal in the woods, like the animal dream sequences of Ildikó Enyedi’s On Body and Soul (Teströl és lélekröl) (2021), where the meaning is more metaphorically suggestive than real.  But it has that kind of primal instinct fury, born out of desperation and arising out of grim circumstances, as death lingers like a shroud of darkness, completely altering the landscape.  It feels like a cautionary tale, something along the lines of There but for the grace of God go I, as morality and good intentions are thrown out the window if they come too late, leading to apocalyptic implications, where those that abuse the earth may face the wrath of nature, which may not sit silently.  What’s truly curious is how the realist, straightforward style suddenly morphs into a surrealist day of reckoning that we must face if we open that Pandora’s Box.  Takumi serves as the medium, as he exists in human form, but also deeply communes with nature, where he embodies that spiritual connection, at one with the trees, the wind, the water, and the animals, where they are inseparable.  Yet Takumi regularly forgets to pick up his daughter from school, so she exerts her self-reliant independence and typically chooses to walk home through the woods alone, which can be a precarious adventure veering into a Grimm Brother’s fairy tale, as the forest can be fraught with danger, despite all the beauty, where we seem to be transported into the wilderness of a parallel universe.  The lush, hypnotic score that accompanies the darkly haunting finale provides a key, featuring an anxious turn into something more meditative and somber, offering a disconsolate mood with no relief, where we feel the weight of frustration inside an enveloping bleakness, as we return once again to another Komorebi sequence in the trees, this time against a darker sky.  The existential ambiguity we’re left with does not happen often in films, yet must be praised when handled with such a deft hand, as we’re left with no answers, just a sublime journey into the melancholic abyss.