Going into Blair Witch, my question was the same as everyone else’s: How do you make a 17-year-old phenomenon feel fresh? When it was first released in 1999, The Blair Witch Project was like nothing most audiences had seen before—but now, shaky-cam fare is hardly a rare commodity. The style’s enduring popularity is a testament to the original movie’s innovation, but it’s also the new project’s biggest roadblock.

Blair Witch follows James, the younger brother of one of the original Blair Witch victims. He’s spent most of his life wondering if his sister, Heather Donahue, might still be alive. A new video discovered in the woods emboldens James, who thinks he sees his sister in the footage—so he ventures into the vast forest with three friends. One of those tagalongs, Lisa, films the whole outing for her documentary-film class. Their main goal? Find the house seen at the end of The Blair Witch Project.

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We pretty much know where this is headed: even from the trailer, it’s clear we’re going to end up back at that dilapidated house, staring at handprints on the wall and listening to frightened youths wailing each other’s names into the hopeless void. But there are plenty of baffling twists along the way—one of which might confirm a controversial theory about what, exactly, happened to Heather, Josh, and Mike all those years ago. If you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want basically all of the suspense ruined, now is the time to leave.

This sequel is extremely loyal to the original—although it seems to largely ignore the 2000 sequel, Book of Shadows, as most fans do. Some reviews, including Vanity Fair’s, have said that Blair Witch’s fidelity to the first movie is limiting. And it’s true that, narratively, at least, this movie doesn’t really blaze its own trail. But it does riff on the original’s mythology, perhaps even shifting how fans should understand The Blair Witch Project. Example? This movie seems like very firm proof of a fan theory that’s existed for years: that Heather, Mike, and Josh weren’t just lost in the woods, but instead found themselves trapped in a time warp.

The heart of The Blair Witch Project is its refusal to grant its audience even a small morsel of clarity. The film itself contains barely any action: most of it is an ominous character study, in which Heather, Josh, and Mike are all shown to be unreliable. We never see whatever is terrorizing them, and the film’s ending is totally ambiguous—which thrills some viewers and infuriates others. Given the open ending, it’s no surprise that fans have been coming up with theories for decades as they try to parse out what really happened.

One of the most “out there” theories folds in a supernatural element—that the Blair Witch has the ability to manipulate time and space within the Black Hills Forest, and that after they wander into the woods, Heather and company actually warp back in time. That would explain why they can’t seem to find their car, and why search parties never found them. Of course, the simpler answer to those questions is that they get very lost in a very large forest. But there’s another factor that makes the time-travel theory so compelling: just before the original film’s release, Syfy (then Sci-Fi Channel) aired a mockumentary called Curse of the Blair Witch, which claims that the freaky house where the students end up was actually burned down in the 1940s. Their footage, the documentary says, was found in the house’s apparently undisturbed foundation—which would have been built decades before the students were even born. Few explanations would explain that idiosyncrasy better than time travel—unless you’re willing to call it a continuity error between the film and the “documentary.”

So, how does the new movie support that theory? By making it explicit. In Blair Witch, director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett (who collaborated on You’re Next and The Guest) largely dispense with The Blair Witch Project’s emphasis on implication. Where the original whispers, the sequel shouts. Instead of implying that time is being warped, the movie repeatedly states, out loud through its characters, that something is amiss.

First, it seems that different areas of the forest pass time differently from others. James and co. initially venture into the forest with two locals, who quickly prove themselves too creepy to keep around. But mere hours after the groups split up, the interlopers find their way back to James’s camp—and claim that five days have passed on their end. They could be lying—they’re not the most trustworthy people—but they do look pretty spooked and bedraggled. Further proof? When Lisa’s seven A.M. alarm goes off, it’s still dark outside—and the sun never comes back up before the movie ends.

In the original, once the map is lost, the group arbitrarily follows the compass south, but ends up somehow walking in a circle. The same thing happens in Blair Witch, when some mysterious force messes with the crew’s G.P.S. (Yes, the students in this movie have plenty of new toys, including G.P.S., earpiece cams, and even a drone!) It’s easy to assume that the original group just didn’t know how to use a compass—but would anyone really buy that four members of the Google Maps generation could get lost using G.P.S.? (Even the original makes it hard to believe Heather could really bungle things that much: one of her favorite hobbies is hiking!) Something sinister is clearly afoot.

Perhaps most interestingly, it seems Blair Witch might have slipped in a subtle trick—one that almost matches the original’s sly time-warp narrative (assuming you believe it, of course).

That tape the locals found—the one that launched this whole expedition? The film quietly drops strong hints that it’s from the group’s own camera. And the girl in the mirror? It seems very likely it wasn’t Heather—it was James’s film-student friend, Lisa.

Early on, as the group makes its way deep into the woods, Lisa asks the local who found the tape, Lane, about his camera. It’s an older model that she notes uses the exact same tape as the one he claims to have found. In the end, when James runs into the house and Lisa follows soon after, the shots start to look very familiar. As with the first film, things happen fast—and having only seen the film once, it’s hard to say for sure what we’re looking at. But it seemed that the footage from the beginning is actually the same footage seen at the end—and that the girl in the mirror is actually Lisa, who ends up holding Lane’s camera. (In case it wasn’t obvious already, Lane ends up attacking Lisa in the house—but now he has a beard, because time has passed faster for him than for the others.)

Assuming that’s true, the resulting tape would have been found under circumstances as bizarre as the ones surrounding the footage in the original movie. Somehow, Heather, Mike, and Josh’s backpack of footage ended up in the foundation of a house that burned down before they were even alive. Now, the footage Lisa recorded on Lane’s camera ends up in the woods before they ever actually went into the woods. Lane claims the short segment that inspires the action of the new movie is all that could be made out from the tape—that the rest was just black and static. But if that were true, the rest of the film from his camera wouldn’t have made it into the final “documentary,” Blair Witch itself. Then again, maybe he lied, and the footage was good—he just wanted to terrorize whoever came looking for the tape. But wait. . . did the film even use any other footage from his camera?

Clearly, Wingard and Barrett did something right—because now I’m going to have to re-watch to sort this all out.