A second viewing of Denis Villeneuve’s dark mindbender Enemy doesn’t illuminate the WTFs of the film in the way that most would hope. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a man who discovers and confronts what seems to be his exact lookalike, the Kafkaesque Enemy is very much experimental and very much a work of abstract filmmaking on many levels. It also happens to be one of the most spellbinding, terrifying, and downright fascinating little movies of recent memory.

Set in a concrete-and-metal Toronto draped in beautiful shadows of industrial noir, there’s really nothing poor to say about the look and tone of Villeneuve’s most recent tale (he and Gyllenhaal also teamed on Prisoners in 2013, another intense and beautifully shot film). Enemy is intercut with close-ups of the characters and wide panning cityscapes, gridlocked traffic jams juxtaposed alongside messy bedsheets, and at times the effect of the editing is truly mesmerizing.

Gyllenhaal, too, is tough to look away from, and he plays both Adam (the “main character”, if such a thing exists in Enemy) and Anthony (the doppelgänger who seems to take more and more screentime from Gyllenhaal No. 1) with subtlety and — dare I say it — brilliance. Hard to pin brilliance on the guy from Prince of Persia, but I suppose it’s equally exciting that Gyllenhaal has abandoned those moneygrab projects in favor of stuff like Enemy, Prisoners and the upcoming Nightcrawler, which looks great.

There are more than a few shots throughout the course of Enemy that are just impossible to process, I think, regardless of how many times you’ve viewed it. Like some similar moves by David Lynch, Villeneuve’s insertion of these impossible images really make the overall film more compelling. Not only will the final shots of the film leave you scratching your head, but they’ll eventually lead you to question even the “believable” elements of Enemy that came before.

So while a light isn’t suddenly flicked on by watching Enemy twice — there’s really no hope of turning all of the ?s into !s — a second viewing does shine a different kind of glow on things. The imagery, again, is just plain beautiful – but it’s also telling a story on its own, showing things that lurk in plain sight, things we’re very obviously terrified by, things we attempt to control, things that are inevitable. Whatever it is that Enemy ultimately presents is almost certain to stay in your head long after the credits roll.