You thought you’d seen the last of Lindsay Lohan, actor. You heard the stories about her being uninsurable. You read the nightmare tales from the set of The Canyons. You discovered all her various new paths; businesswoman, reality star, apparent attempted kidnapper of refugee children. Taken as a whole, this would seem to signify the end of Lohan’s acting career.

How wrong you were. Lindsay Lohan is back, baby. Of all the great cinematic resurrections – Travolta, Brando, Downey Jr – this might just top them all. Just when you’d written her off, Lindsay Lohan is about to blaze back on to our screens in a new film, Among the Shadows.

True, you might not know all that much about Among the Shadows. Maybe you saw the poster, where a giant Lindsay Lohan looms over Big Ben with her hair replaced by a wolf, and assumed it was a spoof or a meme or a billboard for a discount fragrance that brings you out in scabs. Maybe you heard the film’s release strategy, straight to VOD without any fanfare at some point next month, and assumed it was a dud. Maybe you searched for the film, and saw that only four of its cast are notable enough to warrant Wikipedia pages – or three if you don’t count the guy whose name accidentally links to a page about a long dead Flemish journalist – and decided that this whole thing was going to be an abject mess from start to finish.

But that’s your loss. Lindsay Lohan may no longer be the sparky young talent from The Parent Trap, or even the breathless screwball who starred opposite Chris Pine in Just My Luck, but she still has value. In fact, you could even argue her talent has developed. She’s dug deep into herself here, and discovered a whole new layer to her craft.

Just watch her in the Among the Shadows trailer; she isn’t adhering to Stanislavski’s system of internal truth or Meisner’s in-the-moment commitment. Instead, she’s right out there on a limb, pioneering a bold new acting theory known as Never Sharing the Frame With Other Characters, So It Looks As If All Your Lines Were Filmed Remotely in a Single Day, And Also Being Quite Rigid and Flat and Squinting in a Manner That Suggests You’re Simply Reading Just Your Lines From a Card Off-Screen. When this becomes the accepted form of mainstream screen acting in generations to come, and it will, remember where you saw it first.

But what is Among the Shadows about? Simple: werewolves. Or vampires. Or sort of werewolfy vampire things that have glowing eyes and seem to have a rudimentary grasp of kung-fu. And it’s also about a woman whose uncle was murdered. And she’s investigating the werewolves. And she’s also secretly a werewolf herself. It’s Blade Runner, essentially, if Blade Runner was about werewolves and also so terrible that just watching the trailer made you lose the will to live a little bit.

But listen, that doesn’t matter because Lindsay Lohan is the only thing that anyone cares about here. And she plays the wife of the president. We know this because, in the trailer, she says: “Someone wants to kill my husband,” and another actress replies “He is the president, after all,” in a manner that make you unsure whether Lindsay Lohan’s character even knew that. What role she plays after this interaction is anyone’s guess. At one point in the trailer she mumbles something indecipherable that sounds like “dongle dongle” and then we see her engulfed in flames.

Might this be all she actually does in Among the Shadows? Is she simply a big name drafted in for a day’s work to help the film secure funding? Hardly. These are the movies, and Lindsay Lohan is a tentpole name. You don’t let off your biggest firework first, do you? Maybe she’s integral to the plot of Among the Shadows. Maybe she’s in most of the scenes, and she spends its duration delivering emotional profundities while performing all manner of high-wire action sequences.

Or maybe she really was on set for a day, and disinterestedly mumbled all her lines and then went back to Mykonos never to make another film. Either way, I’m definitely going to watch Among the Shadows, and I look forward to being the only person in the world who does.