From its luxurious running time to its sprawling cast of characters, Mysteries of Lisbon is an expansive epic of magisterial novelistic ambition. The last work that Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz was able to complete during his lifetime, this sumptuous 2010 adaptation of Portuguese author Camilo Castelo Branco’s 1854 doorstopper is an invitation to unwind in the myriad pleasures of its circuitous mythmaking.

Cinema and the novel have always been frequent bedfellows, but it’s a rare work for the screen that can retain the kinds of literary devices that seem singular to the page. With its constantly shifting perspectives, intricate flashback structure, and adoption of narrators reliable or otherwise, Ruiz’s masterwork turns its fictions inside out, and wears the very components of its storytelling on its sleeve.

A Dickensian saga of great expectations, Mysteries of Lisbon romps through the drawing rooms of European high society with melodramatic abandon. For all its formal ingenuity, this is a work of conspiratorial gratification. Secrets are whispered as servants listen in; a wronged woman plots ferocious revenge; and love triangles proliferate from the heat of a stolen gaze. Ruiz matches the literary intelligence of Borges and Proust with the propulsive plotting of Dumas and Hugo, conjuring a sinuous narrative labyrinth of disguises and vendettas, pirates and doomed trysts, dual identities and dashing rogues.

This extended version presents Mysteries of Lisbon in six parts, as originally aired on television, providing a rare opportunity to get lost in the endlessly generating passageways of Ruiz’s complete vision. At once a love letter to the digressive comforts of the 19th-century novel, and a cinematic deconstruction of its very mechanics, Mysteries of Lisbon is Ruiz’s magnum opus—a lavish summation of a career that was endlessly fascinated by the form and function of the fictions we tell ourselves and each other.