It’s no secret that Tim Burton’s recent films aren’t as great as they used to be. Since the mid-2000s, the Edward Scissorhands director has been all but sleepwalking through his career, with a series of uninspired fantasy films and Disney adaptations that felt like vague approximations of his singular gothic style. It’s one of the curses of being boxed into a specific visual brand — like his cohort Wes Anderson, Burton can never get away from being, well, Tim Burton.

So why not go back to one of his earliest, and most bizarre, successes? Burton’s 1989 classic Beetlejuice was the director’s first major commercial hit and the movie that cemented his signature style. To this day, it remains an eccentric high point for the director — wildly creative, shockingly crass, and a little bit weird for a mainstream family-friendly hit. Its terrifically tactile marriage of Burton’s macabre style with a wonderfully wacky, outsized performance from Michael Keaton helped create a cinematic icon that belongs in the annals of movie history, never to be touched again. But because we live in an era where IP rules all, Beetlejuice is back, and the result is, surprisingly, a total blast.

“Disclaimer: Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.”

That is the odd text at the beginning of a book that renowned documentary journalist Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett) finds waiting for her in the mail. The book is called The Perfect Stranger, and, at first, it seems like a deliciously sordid piece of fiction perfect for paging through right before bed. But as she reads further, Catherine sits bolt upright and sprints for the bathroom, puking her guts out as visions of her younger self (played by Leila George), naked and writhing, flash onscreen.

It’s the first of many cryptic glimpses to the past that writer-director Alfonso Cuarón seeds throughout Disclaimer, a riveting psychological thriller that unfolds deliberately and carefully until its sordid surface crumbles away to reveal a devastating truth.