Resurrection and the art of the unsayable: a late-career statement from Bi Gan

When the lights came up after the Cannes premiere of Resurrection on 17 May 2026, the auditorium sat in a hush that had little to do with politeness. Audiences had just spent two and a half hours inside the head of a grief-stricken film projectionist wandering a small southwestern Chinese city, and the film had ended not with resolution but with an interruption — a stretch of darkness, a question, a refusal. Critics filing out, including the Scroll.in dispatch that prompted this column, were still parsing what they had actually watched.

The brief from a single source is straightforward on the surface: Resurrection is visionary, transcendent, and the most accomplished Bi Gan film to date. The harder, more interesting question is what kind of object the film actually is, and what its arrival — at Cannes, in the middle of a turbulent year for Chinese auteur cinema on the international circuit — says about how the country's most ambitious directors are choosing to address their own audiences.

What the film is, and is not

The plot, as much as it can be summarised, follows a young projectionist whose partner has died and who begins to see, or believe he sees, the dead in the seats around him. The film unfolds across a single winter, mostly at night, mostly in long takes. There is little conventional narrative momentum. There is a great deal of light — projected, reflected, drizzled through wet provincial streets — and a great deal of silence.

Scroll.in's critic frames it as visionary and transcendent. The word "visionary" does real work there. Resurrection is not a film that hands the viewer a moral; it is a film that asks the viewer to accept that some experiences refuse the language available to describe them. Bi Gan has long worked in that register — Kaili Blues (2015), Long Day's Journey Into Night (2018) and Dreaming of You (2024, presented out of competition at Cannes) all built their endings around the dissolution of plot into image. Resurrection, by the available account, simply pushes further along the same road.

The risk of that mode is opacity. The reward, when it works, is the sense that the cinema is doing something no other medium can — registering loss at the threshold of representation. The Cannes reception suggests the reward, for most reviewers, won out.

A director in late style

Bi Gan is in his mid-thirties. To call a film by a director that age a "late statement" is a category error, except in the sense Bi Gan himself has invited it: he has spoken in past interviews about the personal loss that informs Resurrection, and the title is not a metaphor he is hiding. This is a film made by someone reckoning, on screen, with what can be recovered and what cannot.

That framing matters because Chinese art cinema of the 2010s and early 2020s was often discussed in the West through the lens of formal innovation alone — the long take, the recursive time-structure, the provincial mise-en-scène. Resurrection, by all available accounts, fuses that formal vocabulary to a more direct emotional demand. The grief is not subtext. The question of whether the dead can be reached, and at what cost, is the film's surface as well as its depth.

For a director who has spent a decade being introduced to Western audiences as a stylist, the move is significant. It is also a defensive one. When the international festival circuit is the principal window a Chinese auteur has onto the wider world, the temptation is to perform a kind of avant-garde legibility — to confirm the expectations of critics in Cannes, Locarno and Toronto. Bi Gan's apparent refusal of that legibility in Resurrection is the most interesting formal choice in the film.

The political reading — and the limits of the political reading

Any Chinese film that premieres at Cannes in 2026 will be read, in Western coverage, against a backdrop of tightening official space for independent cinema at home, the longer shadow cast over festival selections by Beijing's cultural authorities, and the general contraction of room for filmmakers who operate outside the commercial mainstream. The temptation is to treat Resurrection as a coded gesture within that frame.

The available evidence does not support that reading cleanly. Scroll.in's reviewer describes a film concerned with mortality, image and projection — not with explicit political content. There is a respectable argument that the act of making a non-commercial, formally radical, emotionally direct film in the current Chinese climate is itself a political statement. There is an equally respectable argument that the film's power is precisely that it declines to instrumentalise its own conditions of production.

Both readings can be true at once. What is fair to say is that a film this strange, this patient, and this uninterested in translation has very few commercial distribution paths in any market, and that the international festival circuit remains — for better and worse — the principal route by which work of this kind reaches an audience. The Chinese state-aligned press has not, on the evidence available in the source material, engaged with the film at all. The Western critical apparatus has, and warmly. The audience in the middle — Chinese viewers who do not attend Cannes — is the constituency the international press is least equipped to speak for.

Stakes and what remains uncertain

For Chinese art cinema, the stakes of Resurrection's reception are partly about prestige and partly about survival. A warmly reviewed Cannes premiere does not, by itself, translate into a domestic release; the record of recent years is that the most formally adventurous Chinese films often struggle to find Chinese distributors, even when international press is glowing. Whether Bi Gan's relative visibility — built over three previous festival hits — translates into a wider audience for this film inside China is, on the available evidence, genuinely uncertain.

The other open question is what Resurrection does to the director's own trajectory. He has, in the space of a decade, gone from a provincial first feature shot on a shoestring to a Cannes Competition title with international co-production money behind it. The pattern of art-cinema careers in China is rarely linear; it is shaped by censorship reviews, by shifts in who is willing to fund what, and by the periodic disappearance of entire distribution channels for non-commercial work. A film that refuses its own legibility is also a film that asks more of the institutions around it than they may be willing to give.

The single most useful thing a reader can take from the source material is this: the critical consensus describes Resurrection as the work of a director who has decided that the cinema he wants to make is, in his own words via his work, the cinema worth making. Whether the world that screens, distributes and remembers films is built to receive that decision is a separate question — and one that the festival circuit, for all its genuine enthusiasm, cannot answer on its own.

Desk note: Monexus treated this as a single-source staff review and resisted the urge to extrapolate from Western press releases or industry-trade speculation beyond what the cited piece supports. Where the source's verdict is firm, the article carries it; where the broader political and distributional context is genuinely unresolved, the article says so.