Resurrection

I found it exhausting. I understand that some people may come out fascinated by its visual ambition, its dream structure, its mixture of genres and that idea of travelling through the history of cinema as a chain of reincarnations. But it did not work for me. It felt like a film very in love with itself, its symbols and its own importance.

I am not saying it is ugly or poor. Quite the opposite: it has highly crafted images, changes of texture, games with time, ghosts, bodies, lights, sets, screens, mutations and a very clear formal will. You can feel that Bi Gan wants to make something huge, sensory, almost hypnotic. The problem is that I did not enter the journey emotionally, and when you do not enter it, all that machinery starts to weigh a lot.

At first I could still let myself go with the strangeness. Some films do not need to explain themselves conventionally if they manage to carry you through atmosphere, rhythm or emotion. But here there came a point when every new symbolic layer pushed me further away. Instead of mystery, I felt accumulation. Instead of wonder, I felt fatigue.

The film demands that you care about its universe: the monster, dreams, memory, cinema, skin, the dead, vampirism, the Delirious One, eternity, images that repeat and transform. But for me it did not earn that interest. When the revelation came that she had been alive for centuries, that she was a vampire, and he reacted almost as if he did not care, my reaction was almost the same: I did not care much either.

And that is fatal for a film of this length. If a work lasts almost three hours and wants to function as an immersive experience, it needs the viewer to want to stay inside. I increasingly wanted to get out. Not because I understood absolutely nothing, but because I stopped caring about what was happening. The difference matters: a film can be complex and fascinating, but it can also be complex and tiresome.

The Delirious One sums up my problem very well. The film can wrap him in skin, myth, memory, delirium and solemnity, but if the viewer feels nothing for that concept, it becomes one more grandiloquent word. I did not care who he was, what he represented or why he was supposed to feel transcendent. And when the symbolic center of a film leaves you cold, no beautiful image can fully save it.

I was also irritated by the feeling that it does not know how to end. Even at the finale, with the shining dead melting and the screen marking the close, it needs to add another visual layer, another ceremony, another gesture of greatness. Even to finish, it seems to need one last flourish. I was already outside the film and only felt that everything had gone on too long.

I can understand the enthusiastic reviews. There is a formal boldness here that is not seen every day, and for a viewer truly devoted to cinema as dream, collage, hallucination and total homage, the film may be a powerful experience. It has plenty of ambition, and some images do have force. It is not a lazy or vulgar film.

But I understand much more those who see it as an endurance test. For me it was closer to that: a succession of ideas, styles and visions that never became a clear emotion. A lot of display, a lot of intention, a lot of density, but little connection. And when a film becomes impenetrable without making me want to enter it, that impenetrability stops being mystery and becomes distance.

I was especially bothered by its air of "great work about cinema". Sometimes films about cinema can move me deeply, but here it felt too self-conscious, too monumental, too convinced that every image was loaded with meaning. I needed less reverence and more life. Less altar and more pulse.

Visually, I can give it credit. There are fragments that stay in the eye, moments of strange beauty and a formal imagination that cannot be denied. But it is not enough for a film to look important; I need it to affect me. And this one, the more it tried to rise, the further away it left me.

In the end, it felt endless. I did not leave thinking about a difficult masterpiece, but about a film fascinated by its own labyrinth and not very concerned with whether I wanted to walk through it. Ambitious, yes. Hypnotic at times, too. But for me it was heavy, grandiose, cold and emotionally failed. A visual experience with a lot of architecture and very little real need to stay inside.