With a title more in keeping with Easter rather than the Yuletide New Year period, RESURRECTION is a sweeping snore inducing odyssey, a soporific meditation on human and film history.
Set in a near future where humanity has surrendered its ability to dream in exchange for immortality, most of society has embraced this practise. Who doesn’t want to live forever? Well, eternity is a long time and this film tries to mimic the idea of eternity, grinding on and on with oblique, opaque and esoteric flights of fancy.
Apparently, a rebellious few known as the Deliriants continue to indulge in dreamscapes, one in particular who traverses through the film under a myriad of guises and who finds illusion, nightmarish visions, and beauty in an a weird world of his own making, a mash up of history and cinema.
His eyes are camera irises, his heart a movie projector, his ear pitched to a theremin.
Orwellian and Orson Wellsian – the mirror shop sequence more than conjures The Lady From Shanghai- with huge homage to Murnau and the German film expressionists, RESURRECTION begins well with illusory allusions to silent film and classic noir, but tends to bog down in its more traditional narrative approach. Forty minutes of enthralling, intriguing imagery is not enough to offset a further two hours of somnolent story telling.
As with most epic pictures with excessive length, RESURRECTION is a brilliant short film waiting to be resurrected from a bloated feature. What starts off as lyrically illustrative turns into blank verse that is inscrutable. A sort of EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE without the sense of fun.
RESURRECTION, then, is for audiences who enjoy enigma. Or suffer from insomnia.
