The Vanished Elephant has two main stars: One we see and one we don’t. The one we see is the city of Lima, the capital of Peru. The film’s director of photography, Maurico Vidal, does a brilliant job of capturing the strange beauty of this city by the sea (and a sea that always appears to be stormy or troubled). We see the quality of Lima’s air and light, the colors of its shrubs and trees, the rise and fall of its roads. We are also treated to Spanish colonial interiors and modernist architecture. All of this is just wonderful.

The star we don’t see is the dead Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. He is the ghost in the film’s script, which was written by the film’s director, Javier Fuentes-León, and is about a crime novelist who gets lost in the maze of his own crime novel and its invented character.

This kind of thing is called a metaphysical crime story. It is heady, it often confuses reality and fiction, and it is very Borgesian. The reason to watch The Vanished Elephant, however, is for the seen star and not the ghost in its story. Rare is the metaphysical crime story that’s more entertaining than a regular crime story.