It has been a full three decades since Spanish director Victor Erice made his last feature film, El Sur (1983), and that film came out a decade after his much-heralded debut, The Spirit of the Beehive (El espíritu de la colmena, 1973), which is widely considered one of the greatest Spanish films ever made. So, it almost goes without saying that his newest film, Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los ojos), arrives with a great deal of anticipation if only because one can’t help but be curious about what an artist of Erice’s stature might produce after such a long fallow period. The enormity of the gap between this and his last film and his overall limited body of work puts perhaps undue burden on Close Your Eyes to be something … profound. And it is, and it isn’t. And I imagine that is exactly what Erice wanted it to be.

In a clever sleight of hand, the opening 15 minutes of Close Your Eyes, which depicts an aging, probably dying Frenchman in an isolated chateau hiring a man to find his daughter, is all misdirection, as it is not Erice’s film, but rather a fragment of a film within the film. This scene is the only one completed in a film that was to be directed by Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) starring his good friend, Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado). However, after that brief bit of footage was shot, Julio literally disappeared from the face of the earth—gone without a trace, leaving Miguel’s film perpetually unfinished. That was 20 years ago. The narrative proper picks up with Miguel, now a novelist who lives a largely isolated life in a small commune along the Spanish coast, being drawn back into the mystery of his friend’s disappearance via an interview with producer-journalist Helena Miquel (Marta Soriano), who hosts an Unsolved Mysteries-style television program. Miguel admits that he is doing it largely for the money, but there is also the suggestion that he has been unable to shake the specter of unanswered questions, and doing the interview forces him back into commune with a previous life that he has otherwise left behind. This also brings him back into contact with various figures from his past, including his intrepid editor Max (Mario Pardo) and Julio’s now grown daughter, Ana (Ana Torrent, one of the two little girls from The Spirit of the Beehive).

As Hitchcock did in Vertigo (1958), Erice, who also wrote the film’s screenplay, solves much of the film’s mystery about two-thirds of the way through the story, which means that the narrative takes a sharp turn into very different, and arguably more emotionally fertile, territory in its final third. Ambiguity abounds as Miguel is faced with a resolution that is still open-ended and unsatisfying, and one that might only be solved with the presentation of cinema itself. Close Your Eyes has a decidedly meta-cinematic weight to it—how could it not with the protagonist being a failed film director haunted by an unfinished work?—but that dimension is ultimately secondary to the emotional weight of Miguel’s journey back into his past. Manolo Solo, who has a deeply expressive face and a way of carrying philosophical burden in his bones, gives the film a quiet, steady center that draws us in slowly and methodically. Some might argue that Close Your Eyes moves too slowly for its own good, but Erice has a clear sense of Miguel’s plight and the various forces pulling at him. If this turns out to be Erice’s final film, it will be a fitting capstone to a fascinating, enigmatic career—but let us hope that it is not.

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