Resurrection 2025

The film opens as a silent movie. I was kind of waiting for the right opportunity to properly watch one ever since I watched Babylon, and luckily I experienced it here. It’s a nice experience, just focusing on acting and musical score without dialogue. Sets, lights, sounds, color, and score are the first things I appreciated. The film immediately reminds me how much cinema can communicate without speech. There are old style techniques used here like forced perspective and double exposure, which adds to that early cinema texture. After around 22 minutes, the look changes, and the film starts evolving visually and tonally. Immortality is portrayed as boring and mechanical. Cinema, on the other hand, breathes life into the forgotten once again. That contrast becomes clearer as the film progresses. The first dream feels like a noir crime film. Lots of steam, smog, black and blue colors. Investigative, slowburn. I get Inception vibes, like there are layers of dreams stacked on top of each other. One choice that really caught me off guard was the use of snoring as sound design. WTF moment. It’s uncomfortable but strangely hypnotic. As the film moves forward, each dream subtly reflects a different cinematic era. Using various camera techniques appropriate to that period, even the aspect ratio changes too! I was most engaged during the con part. The code speak, the trickery, the performance within performance..That section feels alive and playful, like cinema rediscovering its own trickery. The color grading in the 1999 scene is also great, with long continuous shots using invisible cuts. Ang laki ng set, and it reminded me of BuyBust in terms of scale and spatial complexity. The rain sound design there is immersive too, especially when watched in Atmos. It puts you inside the frame rather than just watching it. Immortals not dreaming feels like a Little Prince idea. Adults forgetting how to enjoy, dream, or be children again because the modern world is obsessed with money. In the film, it feels like people forgot how to watch cinema, or in this context, how to dream. It reads like a death of cinema metaphor. Instead of experiencing small joys, we focus on profit. Cinema becomes “too aspirational” or dismissed as a waste of time. The film doesn’t always make sense, but that’s how dreaming works. There are films like that, even with Christopher Nolan. Not everything is meant to be logical. It’s emotional, subconscious, fragmented. For me, this is more about cinematic language than story. You’re not supposed to fully understand it. You’re supposed to feel it. The ending, where Shu Qi “drops” the corpse into the water behind a sealed wall door, feels symbolic. For me, it represents cinephiles being forced to consume watered-down content by modern cinema. Movies that don’t challenge us to think or feel. Slowly, that kind of consumption makes cinema itself feel dead.