Do you miss James Bond already? Or do you think there’s a future for spy cinema without the most famous secret agent in film history? Meanwhile, haven’t you sometimes wished these movies would get stranger, more hallucinatory, than their formula ever allows? If your answer is yes to any of these questions, then you’ll be glad to know Reflection in a Dead Diamond exists.

This is the fourth collaboration between the Belgian-based French filmmaking duo Bruno Forzani and Hélène Cattet, who are also husband and wife. Their creative partnership is defined by a distinctly postmodern eye and purpose: They take familiar genres and cinematic tropes in order to deconstruct them without simply dissecting them. We could say they’re Tarantinos in reverse. Their approach is philosophical first and stylistic second, more self-critical than self-referential about film history.

In the case of their take on the expected heights of action and suspense typical of spy stories, let’s say Cattet and Forzani keep the cool stuff, but they want us to interrogate why we’re drawn to this genre—especially when many of its representations historically come laced with colonialist violence and misogyny. They’re aware that these elements inevitably form part of what makes James Bond films, for instance, a kind of inexhaustibly seductive guilty pleasure. (Steven Spielberg admitted he created Indiana Jones as America’s answer to Bond; Christopher Nolan never got to direct one, but we ended up with Tenet instead.)

The protagonist spy is presented first as a man in his seventies, retired from his dangerous trade: John Diman (Fabio Testi) hasn’t abandoned his old habits, unable or unwilling to truly enjoy his quiet retirement at a hotel on the French Riviera. He sits by the shore of a beach, sipping the effervescent cocktails he orders nonstop, watching through binoculars the bodies of young women who once would have fallen at his feet. Yet he remains a spy—suspicious of the machinery around him, seeing conspiracies everywhere, convinced that old enemies still lurk, ready to strike the final blow they failed to deliver when he was younger and sharper. In his current state, he is left with two options: to endlessly wander the corridors of memory—his past glories and defeats—or to assume he is still just a pawn in conspiracies that persist in a world that is already leaving him behind.

The film weaves together multiple flashbacks and dreams in such a way that events occurring across different temporal lines gradually develop a sense of connective logic, leading toward the resolution of a larger mystery. Under Cattet and Forzani’s gaze, the dialogue between past and present becomes a method of questioning what we’re seeing, and of interrogating just how heroic John really is. (It’s unclear whether he worked for MI6 or another European intelligence service.)

The young John D (Yannick Renier) appears as a figure highly reminiscent of Sean Connery’s embodiment of James Bond: cold, detached, and sophisticated. Visually, the film follows that same pop-psychedelic aesthetic halfway between comic-book paneling and a matter-of-fact Warholian synthesis, taking what’s familiar and overused about spy genre iconography and elevating it into a striking pop artifact. John D uses the cool gadgets, seduces beautiful women, and infiltrates strategic locations to hunt down criminals. One of them is a businessman with a taste for killing women by covering them in a black substance to suffocate them and turn them into artworks, using the ink from their bodies to paint his canvases—a direct homage to Goldfinger, but also a symbol of the fetishistic exploitation of the female body in the name of art. While we can tell who the “good guy” is in these missions, John D is an insufferably self-assured jerk with few scruples. For instance, he’s unbothered by disfiguring a woman’s face with a diamond-studded ring to extract the answers that will lead him to his target.

Among his allies is Cantatrice (Kézia Quental), a woman spy whose mirror-tiled dress can function alternately as video cameras and projectile razor blades. With her, the chauvinist spy discusses the equality between men and women, so his notions of gender disparity are already beginning to feel obsolete. (We can assume his youth takes place in the 1960s.) Meanwhile, one of his major opponents is also a woman: Serpentik (Thi May Nguyen), a master of disguise and highly skilled fighter capable of executing with extreme violence every man in a bar without leaving a single one standing. This sequence is a highlight, with no restriction on how much blood is spilled or how many ways bodies may be punched, broken, or slashed in all their gory splendor. A third enemy has metaphysical weaponry, being far more elusive and capable of killing opponents long before they realize it—a hypnotist who distorts reality and makes events appear as if they’re part of a movie. In a way, a representation of cinema as the ultimate tool for feeding addictive delusions.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond, with its fragmented editing and an expressionist nerve, plunges you into the pure pleasure of a film that writes its own rules. No image or sensation here is merely brainless. Cattet and Forzani’s examination of the spy genre works as an affectionate exposé of how cinema shapes our desires—dreams sometimes forbidden, sometimes too beautiful for us not to feel a little ashamed of them. In this case, the enchantment comes with an antidote. We can love cinema and fall under its spell, but we must remain alert, aware that what we consume is never entirely harmless.