“The day the world almost ended at 8 p.m., a tree fell down. No one heard it, but later I saw it.”
– Andrew J. Eisenman
No one knows what to do with the film spoken of as “Bi Gan’s Resurrection.” And almost no one saw it in theaters. It may also become one of the most important films of the decade, and a forever film, depending on who finds it now.
From the outside, it was seen as an international awards play from Janus Films, the theatrical imprint associated with The Criterion Collection. This 2025 film was released in theaters too late in the awards race to make a dent and its marketing also underserved it. It hits shelves Tuesday, April 21st, 2026, through Criterion Premieres.
Mark Chao You-Ting in Bi-Gan’s 2025 surreal fantasia RESURRECTION. Photo courtesy of The Criterion Collection.
Titled Wild Times in China, the film was unhelpfully re-titled Resurrection in English, and the poster is a nonsensical abstraction. The film is easily missed on a database, next to Resurrection (2022), Resurrection (1999), Resurrection (2015), Resurrection (1980), Resurrection (1930), and myriad more. The trailer communicating prestige while hiding the cross-over appeal the film should have had with the Asian exploitation audience that has exploded with the arrival of Criterion competitors like Radiance Films and Third Windows Films.
“Time is running out.”
The experience of Resurrection itself invites a reputation of prestigious mystique. Carlos Aguilar of the LA Times tweeted upon seeing the film that it “could almost convince you cinema as a medium was solely conceived so that this film could one day exist.” Siddhant Adlakha, who also contributed the short writings in the included zine, initially wrote from Cannes that “It’s the closest thing we have to experiencing dreams while waking.” David Ehrlich of Indiewire wrote on Letterboxd, “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.” On my part, I initially found it too overwhelming to review during its theatrical run in January.
Ultimately, this is a silly atmosphere to gather around a film where a timecop hunts down a “monster” for the crime of dreaming about watching movies. But the film earns that mystique.
Director Bi Gan (Long Day’s Journey into Night; Kaili Blues) has delivered a nearly 3-hour fantasia that explains its premise in the opening intertitle:
“In a wild and brutal era, humans have discovered that the secret to eternal life is to no longer dream.”
In the world of Resurrection, the side-effect of this immortality is that your dreams can infect reality, and if you dream of another time, you can infect it with your own dream logic. Therefore, someone has to stop you. In the inciting incident of the film, the intertitle burns away like a piece of paper, revealing the audience of an early 1900s Chinese movie palace, proscenium to their backs, looking you in the eye.
A scene from Bi-Gan’s 2025 surreal fantasia RESURRECTION. Photo courtesy of The Criterion Collection.
After security ushers them out, the actress Shu Qi (Millennium Mambo; The Transporter), walks up to the hole in the 4th wall and takes our photo. Back at her home, she enlarges the photo through a paper-craft sequence to reveal ourselves as Jackson Yee (Better Days; Big World). She is the timecop known as The Great Other, and he and we are the dreaming monster known as The Deliriant. In the reflection of our eye, she spies a pile of poppy flowers, leading her to an opium den where the wealthy elites feast on the tears of dreamers.
“What is it that once lost you can never get back?”
In order to free us, The Deliriant, from the disappointing torture of dreams, she ends our life. Malformed by dreaming while immortal, our Deliriant back is hunched to hold the insides of a projector. In an act of mercy, she runs film through it, stretching the hours of the dreamer into a century of dreamy reincarnations.
Through five chapters, the history of China in the 20th century is explored through the history of cinema. German expressionism, noir, heist films, psychics and spirits, horror, and gun battles bring us through great wars, the cultural revolution, and the night of Y2K.The film includes a staggering 33-minute single-take shot bathed in red light, and it constantly places you as an interlocutor into the narrative of the film, collapsing the wall between the circumstance of your viewing and the past. Cinema has often interrogated the now through retellings of the then, but Resurrection’s resistance to definition and description comes from its subtext as much as from its form.
Jackson Yee in Bi-Gan’s 2025 surreal fantasia RESURRECTION. Photo courtesy of The Criterion Collection
The release of Resurrection is a re-branding of the Janus Originals shingle into Criterion Premieres, a product line that operates like a Criterion-lite. The same box, but no collection number, a shorter zine, and fewer special features. This release comes with just the trailer and the film’s Criterion Channel “Meet the Filmmakers” interview with Bi Gan. In a sign that those involved recognize that Resurrection’s difficulty of definition has hurt its release, the interview is almost entirely Bi Gan laying out a thorough explanation of his intentions, the kind that one would not expect him to give until after a decade of scholarship on the film had had a chance to grow. The most helpful statement for explaining its relationship to the contemporary is as follows:
“From the 20th to the 21st century, people have shared common memories. Regardless of country or culture, everyone has painful memories, beautiful memories, and all kinds of complex emotions.
The history of cinema has played a very important role in shaping this timeline of memories. But today, there is a feeling of sadness when we talk about cinema. This is mainly because we now experience art across so many different screens.
We get most of our visual information from our phones. Our memories are becoming very individualized instead of something we collectively share.
I think this is a loss.”
Beginning the process of interrogating the mise-en-scêne of Resurrection feels like trying to examine the grief of dead love, gone too soon or puncturing a magic trick with an explanation. It’s a frustrating task, especially because the Criterion Premieres format lacks the numerous literary accessories that a proper Criterion entry has. The cultural life of the film feels cut-off before it could start, just like the 21st century; an impenetrable film breached before it could even raise the alarm.
“But to this day, I don’t know what it all means.”
The experience of watching Resurrection is about watching Resurrection. It shows us the majesty of the proscenium itself through prosceniums with no corners and proscenium windows that look like phones. We become the protagonist and the antagonist and we watch them fall in love and fall apart five different ways. If watching a film in a theater is a communal dream, then Bi Gan is asking: will we dream together one last time? Because if the ghosts on that silver screen flicker, are we not flickering back at them also?
I know this tree fell even though I wasn’t around to hear it. Photo courtesy of Andrew Eisenman.
There is no guide to what Resurrection means to cinema in the box, because its history is still being written. Despite the limitations of the Criterion Premieres format, Resurrection remains one of the most exciting physical media releases of the year because the film is waiting for you, even if you weren’t around to hear its arrival. Grab the proscenium and hold on tight.
Resurrection Special Features:
- Meet the Filmmakers: Bi Gan, a Criterion Channel original interview
- Trailer
- Notes by film critic Siddhant Adlakha
Available on Blu-ray and DVD April 21st, 2026.
For more information, head to the official The Criterion Collection Resurrection webpage.
Final Score: 5 out of 5.
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Categories: Films To Watch, Home Release, Home Video, Recommendation, Reviews
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