How should one even classify Resurrection? Fantasy? A film about cinema itself? Or an audacious experiment on memory, perception, and the very way we experience images, continuing the meditative trajectory of Bi Gan’s earlier works? Confronted with the director’s fourth feature, it quickly becomes clear that any attempt to confine the film within conventional meanings or genre categories is futile. The story opens with a silent film-style prologue, meticulously recreating the sets of 1920s German Expressionism. A mysterious woman(Shu Qi), seemingly the living embodiment of cinema, tends to a creature that evokes both Nosferatu and Frankenstein. From this highly analog farce, the narrative unfolds into f ive distinct allegories. In the near future, humans discover that they can live indefinitely if they do not dream. Those who dream are like candles: burning brightly before melting away. Yet, the heretics called ’Fantasmers,’ one of them portrayed by Yi Yangqianxi, refuse to relinquish dreaming, even at the cost of their lives. Through these dreams, they drift across the turbulent and diverse landscapes of 20th-century Chinese history. Here, Bi Gan’s ambition becomes evident. Each episode is a bold sweep across a century of cinema history. The Fantasmer traverses a film noir style chase, a Buddhist temple on a snowbound mountain reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa’s fables, and an episode featuring a 1970s American gambler, ultimately arriving at the eve of the 21st century. Yet any attempt to read Resurrection as a meta-text on f ilm history is deliberately rendered absurd. Bi Gan thrusts the audience into a patternless chaos, asking us to surrender the unconscious desire to impose narrative order and to immerse ourselves instead in the images themselves. The film simultaneously evokes profound meditation and virtuoso technical display. While there are moments of haunting beauty and sudden exhilaration, the individual episodes—structured as an omnibus— do not cohere with quite the same mesmerizing intensity as his earlier work, Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The film’s climax is a breathtaking 30-minute long take. In 1999, the Fantasmer and his lover traverse the city, moving through a landscape that recalls the cinematic poetics of Tsai Ming-liang and Wong Kar-wai, and arriving at a modern vampire tale. At last, Bi Gan delivers a straightforward message: the theater and its audience are candles themselves, melting into light. In that brilliance, as the end credits roll, one can be certain that, at least within Resurrection, cinema has been reborn. Every laborious element of the film is worth enduring to witness that singular, luminous moment.