Close Your Eyes marks a stunning return to cinema for revered Spanish auteur Vctor Erice after a long three-decade absence. A brilliantly structured and deeply personal mystery is slowly unveiled like a master’s paintbrush on a canvas of thoughtful artistic expression. Erice’s elegantly crafted protagonist sorts through the pieces of his broken life to solve a puzzle that instigated his melancholic decline. Love, loss, and reconciliation are addressed on a profound journey of understanding. The two-hour and 50-minute runtime requires a degree of patience sometimes lost on modern audiences, but this story shouldn’t be rushed.