Resurrection | Dreaming at what cost?

What does it mean to be alive? Living one life in a sea of other lifetimes of who you could potentially become, what does it mean to dream?

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Resurrection asks just that. It’s set in a future where humanity has traded the ability to dream for immortality, and so in this world, an outcast begins to explore while sleeping, with nightmarish visions of beauty and horror through the human psyche of our deepest desires.

New cinematic masterpiece

This is the new cinematic masterpiece from Director Bi Gan. Both visually and narratively, it is one of the most unique films I’ve had the pleasure of seeing on the big screen and a stand out from the BFI London Film Festival. It’s bold, vivacious, along with hundreds of other adjectives that could be used to convey its scale and ambitious scope. It’s made me reconsider what’s possible with the medium of the moving image, and anything that inspires someone to pick up a camera and create something can only be a good thing.

Distinctly different and unique

Film is a medium that is often used to tell one kind of story or narrative, especially Western cinema can feel more like reading for lazy people, so I love it when something so distinctly different and unique comes along. This pushes the audiovisual medium further in what it can achieve, given its incredible inventiveness with old school lo-fi tricks like reversing footage or time-lapses all the way up to modern VFX.

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Dreams have, of course, featured in many films, especially sci-fi and primary school creative writing exercises, with the stellar closing line, ‘and then they woke up’. In films such as Inception, it’s more of a narrative device, not fully utilising the sheer absurdity of them which Bi Gan harnesses. Capturing the energy and feeling of dreams in such a unique way, especially capturing the rapid acceptance of new information, every circumstance changing, looking down to see you’re a child in ballet shoes, then suddenly a samurai mastering their weapon.

Explore every inch

Resurrection morphs this lightning-in-a-bottle whirlwind energy into a slow, meditative film that never fails to be entertaining, exploring the heart of what it means to be alive, trapped in one life yet wanting to live as so many people, to explore every inch of what it means to be living on this planet.

If you’d like to hear more of my thoughts on this film, along with other films I recommend to help beat the constant social media scrolling, you can check that out here:

A celebration of filmmaking and humanity

Predominantly, this film feels like a celebration of filmmaking and humanity. Spanning vastly different time periods and filmmaking styles, it’s almost an education in the history of film from the silent era to contemporary cinema. Yet it always keeps humans and their creativity at the centre of it.

The best way I can articulate it is that scenes that would stand out as the most talked about sequences in any other film, Resurrection is a compilation of those back to back as if it’s 39 films pushed together, experimenting with perspective or revolutionising what you think could be possible in long takes. A cinematic journey that made me rethink the medium.

You can start dreaming on 13 March 2026 when Resurrection is released in theatres in the UK & Ireland