David Mamet's favorite game is the high stakes con. In his best movies, a team of conspirators fleeces a privileged and gullible individual. But while most examples of this generally lighthearted genre focus on the machinations of the sharpers, Mamet's much darker works put the sucker at the center. His protagonists risk everything they hold dear—their financial resources, their integrity, their honor, even their sanity—and, in most cases, are forced to relinquish them. His heroes suffer considerably, yet Mamet constructs his plots so that the audience will thrill to the scheming of the antagonists. The traps they set are admirably subtle, entrancingly sneaky. Becoming involved in a Mamet piece means taking delight in the downfall of the vulnerable. His films are a sadistic pleasure.

There is also, of course, an element of masochism to our enjoyment, as there is in viewing a magic act or listening to a long joke. Watching The Spanish Prisoner, written and directed by Mamet, we are not able to predict the next step of its tricky plot, even though in retrospect each new development seems inevitable. The film enthralls us precisely because, try as we might, we cannot guess its outcome. It was made by a storyteller with extra-ordinary and deserved confidence in his ability to surprise.

Conventionally, movies about confidence tricks disorient us by tossing out red herrings. Mamet instead constantly changes our relationship to his main character. There are instances when we feel completely in tune with Joe Ross (Campbell Scott); the decisions he makes are precisely those we would hit upon were we in his situation. But we are not always on such steady ground. Ross is aware of certain matters that are never made clear to us. He has invented something called The Process, a long mathematical formula he has written out in a large red notebook. He claims that his brainchild will control the global market, but never tells us what part of the market he is referring to or how The Process will accomplish this feat. All we know is that the formula stands to bring an enormous windfall to his company.

We accept that Ross is a creative genius, yet there are a number of occasions when we feel superior to him. At such moments, Mamet lets us know Ross is being toyed with, and invites us to cringe at the bad judgment behind his impulsive choices. We learn much more quickly than Ross that creating The Process means dealing with heartless, mercenary people. Mamet accentuates the chilliness by coaching his actors to deliver their lines in a deadpan manner. It's as if his performers had found themselves in a film by Alfred Hitchcock.

The Spanish Prisoner owes a lot to Hitchcock, particularly to North by Northwest. Both mingle corporate life with the world of espionage, telling the story of a man whose greatest weakness and greatest strength lie in his innocence. Both depict heroes framed for conspiracies involving a grisly knife murder and then denied the opportunity to prove the true villain's guilt. Like Cary Grant's Roger Thornhill, Ross is made to suspect his boss, his friends and his coworkers, to reevaluate and betray the codes that have guided his life. But while Thornhill found new love and acceptance after his trials were over, Ross does not seem capable of recovering what he discarded.

Hitchcock's paranoid movies always concluded by revealing that certain apparently sinister forces were in fact harmless. The Spanish Prisoner never abandons its suspicion of all social organizations. Any time a Mamet character mentions allegiance to “my group,” it's time to run for the hills. Ross, by contrast, has no ties: He is a single man with few friends and only a vague sense of allegiance to his company. He is open, straightforward, and unsuspicious—so much so that his secretary Susan Ricci (Rebecca Pidgeon) repeatedly refers to him as a Boy Scout. Wide-eyed and flirtatious, she nevertheless acts as a moral barometer, continually reminding Ross that those driven by a desire for money and power will gladly band together to destroy anyone standing in their way.

The visual style of the film is appropriately economical, as if it too were reacting against the omnivorous people it depicts. In fact, Mamet is one of the few contemporary directors who errs on the side of restraint. The meticulous calculation that goes into each of his shots is often distractingly evident. But the movie has so much going for it that it can be forgiven for showing its seams. Pidgeon, Ben Gazzara, Steve Martin, and longtime Mamet crony Ricky Jay are excellent as figures who have different deep motives for befriending Ross. And Mamet's terse, twisty script is his finest since Homicide, fleshing out the sinister, manipulative motivations that lie beneath gracious gestures and banal actions that only appear to be benign.