If it were possible for a filmmaker to return from the dead it might be that clear-eyed trickster Raúl Ruiz. His posthumously released latest film brings us surreal and elegant thoughts about the border between this world and the next, a frontier as porous as those “special shadows that give out light”-that is, the cinema, as defined here by the director's boyhood alter ego, Rhododendron (Santiago Figueroa). In the Chilean seaport of the film's setting, the precocious boy conjures up heroes from Beethoven to Long John Silver to show them his world as they have shown him theirs. The grown-up Rhodo is a Walter Mitty–like office worker named Celso Barra (Sergio Hernández) who is being pushed into retirement as much for the improbable poetry of his speech as for his advancing age. Don Celso's hero is the amiable French author Jean Giono (Christian Vadim); together they toy with words like words (“butterflies of uncertainty”) and time (“marbles” in play). The film takes a decidedly Pirandellian turn as the residents of a boarding house await the author of Don Celso's death. From the opening pan of Chile's marine desert-“a pale sky above a crumbling world”-to CGI-born backdrops that put space between time and reality, Ruiz's visual message from beyond is that death is just a word, and not to be feared.