Life is grueling. Life is hard. Life is surprisingly beautiful in moments, and not just because Jake Gyllenhaal is in it. Life is bleak, Life is sad. Life is full of body-horror that is really tough to bear. Life, like life, is a lot of painful things. But it’s still a good trip.

Apologies for leaning too heavily on the grand vagueness of Life’s title. It’s just so overwrought and encompassing. But otherwise, Daniel Espinosa’s film—an Alien homage, written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, that justifies its redundancy—is unexpectedly sharp and arresting, a murmur of pathos and intellect rippling underneath all its grinding space-horror. The film’s got something on its mind, not just something wriggling around inside its body.

In a time that seems not too distant from ours—the Challenger explosion is referenced, for example—an international team of astronauts eagerly awaits the return of a soil sample from Mars, delivered by an unmanned probe that will soon arrive at their space station with its bounty. The scientists on board hope that they can extract some organic matter from the sample and, perhaps, synthesize or restore a living organism, in order to prove that we are not alone in this terrible and tumbling universe.

Reader, will it shock you to find out that they do? And that said entity turns out to be quite a bit more sinister than initially thought? Probably not. This is familiar narrative DNA. But, rather refreshingly, the film finds new angles of approach, or at least ones that aren’t too well worn, reshaping huge chunks of Alien and sizable portions of Gravity to form something bracing and scary and interesting, a B-movie with brains. Especially in its ominous and oddly lovely opening minutes, Espinosa and the brilliant cinematographer Seamus McGarvey give the film a stately, haunting mien, Jon Ekstrand’s lush and bombastic score setting the stage for something big. If the subsequent film doesn’t quite live up to that beginning, Reese and Wernick’s script still stays tight and convincing throughout, even when—maybe especially when, actually—it pauses for reflective, emotional beats.

The cast deftly sells it. Gyllenhaal does yet another appealing, recessive turn as a sad-sack doctor who’s been up in space longer than anybody else. (Please go see him as sad-sack painter in Sunday in the Park with George on Broadway if you can—he’s terrific.) He’s well matched by a steely Rebecca Ferguson as a C.D.C. emissary tasked with keeping whatever foreign entity the scientists are able to revive in strict quarantine. (She, uh, fails.) The rest of the crew is played by the great Hiroyuki Sanada, British standout Ariyon Bakare (he plays the curious biologist who’s kinda to blame for the whole thing), Olga Dihovichnaya (who looks so much like Gina McKee it’s a little unnerving), and Ryan Reynolds as a cocky mechanic, because what else would Ryan Reynolds play in this movie. They form a credible team, possessed of an easy camaraderie and actually seeming like smart, capable professionals—despite the deadly screw-ups, that is.

The last member of the cast is my least favorite. He plays Calvin, the shape-shifting alien creature that comes alive and starts killing everybody. (If that’s a spoiler, welcome to Earth!) Deftly animated and given voice by some hideously, squishingly believable foley work, this skittering thing is deeply unpleasant to behold if you’re any sort of bug-phobe. (It doesn’t really look like a bug, but its movements keenly evoke one—until it sorta morphs into an octopus, anyway.) And its method of murder is particularly gruesome, though it begins to lose its potency the more the film bends the rules of the alien’s physics. Ah well. For the most part, it’s a grimly effective performance, hard to watch as it may be.

A lot of Life is difficult going if you’re averse to bugs, body stuff, claustrophobia, the punishing inhospitality of space, etc. But Espinosa’s artful touch tempers that discomfort. Life is tense and unnerving and a total bummer. But it’s still worth it. And no, I don’t know if I’m talking about Life or life anymore either.