Can an inventor/technician with no painterly skills recreate the alchemical oil-on-canvas magic of a visionary artist? This riveting Bafta-nominated documentary follows Tim Jenison's piercingly inquisitive attempts to prove that the precise lighting and finely honed detail of Vermeer's 17th-century paintings were the result of early proto-photographic experiments. To this end, he painstakingly recreates the setting of The Music Lesson, and then attempts to reproduce Vermeer's masterpiece using a complex array of lenses, lightboxes, and, ultimately, mirrors.

The results are astonishing – so much so that you begin to wonder whether this Penn and Teller project isn't in fact an elaborate hoax, a brilliantly constructed illusion. Yet as we watch Jenison blur the lines between forensic investigation and artistic appreciation, our disbelief is duly suspended. The absence of secondary information (letters, documents) seems initially to withhold the possibility of proof, but as David Hockney observes, "the paintings themselves are the documents".

It's a mesmerising film that offers both an intriguing insight into genius and a convincing analysis of the unity of art and science.