With the indispensable aid of his widow and collaborator Valeria Sarmiento, the prolific Raúl Ruiz has given the world another film from beyond the grave. That might seem strange for some directors, but this partnering of living and dead is right on brand for the esoteric exile, whose films always operated in liminal spaces, obscuring the difference between dream and reality, night and day, conscious and unconscious. “The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror,” officially co-directed by Sarmiento and Ruiz (who passed in 2011), is the completion of footage shot by Ruiz in 1967 for what would have been his debut, but instead sat unfinished due to lack of funding for sound and was forgotten after Ruiz’s exile in 1973. While it’s often fair to question the motives of posthumous works (hologram Tupac comes to mind), Ruiz himself stated a desire to finish this film and it’s been carried out by Sarmiento, who was not only a lifelong collaborator with Ruiz (as editor and co-writer) but also directed many films of her own. After rediscovering the negatives a few years ago, Sarmiento completed the film by hiring lip readers to reconstruct the dialogue, using Ruiz’s notes to realize his intended (and unusual) structure, and hiring longtime collaborator Jorge Arriagada to write a soundtrack. The result is a wonderful combination of new and old; a film bearing the charm and originality of a first film whose themes and eccentricities can be seen in the context of a rich career.