It might be ambitious of me to jump directly from Three Colours: White to Red without time off in between, but my movie watching habits have been a bit extreme lately, so I might as well ride the tide.

Over the weekend, I saw some horror shorts at the Chicago Film Festival Friday night, followed up by It Was Just an Accident (Iran) and The Secret Agent (Brazil) on Saturday, topped off with Sentimental Value (Norway) yesterday. I’m putting off writing about these three films for a bit because I like them so much that I don’t want to risk overpraising them. My initial view is that all three rank among the best movies I’ve seen this decade, but I’m going to let that thought stew for a few days.

In addition, I’ve gone on a Jean-Luc Godard film watching frenzy at home over the past week, which is a mind mending experience in its own right.

So I approach “Red” with lots of cinema shaking up my head, and I think that’s a positive thing. Kieslowski has noted in interviews that he’s packed more small details into every frame of “Red” than any film he’s made. Kieslowski likes to drop scene locations into shots before they happen. For example, the first segment of the film ends with Valentine rehydrating after a ballet class — and you can see a church door open behind her. Several scenes later, she will chase a dog into that same church.

The movie also packs in the red imagery throughout. I purposefully did not mention much of the white imagery in the last film, mostly because it’s just a stylistic motif, it doesn’t have great narrative meaning. But the red in “Red” is everywhere and unavoidable.

One thing I took away from “The Secret Agent” that I saw on Saturday was the brilliant way the filmmakers heightened ambiguity throughout. The story kept moving in directions we couldn’t possibly understand as we are viewing it, but attentive viewers can see how it all fits together (and is essential) in the end.

This is exactly the way “Red” must be watched as well. For much of the runtime, the movie does not make sense. I’ve gone through four different periods of viewership for “Red.” First, I loved it, but wasn’t sure I got it all. Second, I liked it quite a bit, but thought it wasn’t as good as “Blue” (a heavily minority opinion.) Third, I developed some theories about the movie that were off base, but interesting. And now, finally, four, I see the movie for the masterpiece it is.

Ranking movies is always a pointless exercise. The best that can be said of any film is that it’s essential, that a movie goer has missed something important in the film watching experience without having seen that movie. “Red” is essential in a way that nothing else in Kieslowski’s filmography achieves. It’s not The Dekalog in its grandiosity and narrative completeness, and in some ways the whole Three Colours trilogy is a bit of a ruse because the films stand alone.

This is a movie that will be remembered as long as there are movies.