Now that’s what I call a face-off! Paramount released the second trailer for director Rupert Sanders’ Ghost in the Shell on Monday morning, and it offers our best look yet at the hotly anticipated anime adaptation. It also offers us a horrifying look at Michael Pitt’s villainous Kuze having an uncomfortably creepy tête-à-tête with Scarlett Johansson’s cyborg cop, The Major, before tearing off her face. Okay, maybe he doesn’t tear it off, but he still removes part of it, revealing the beeping, booping circuitry beneath. If nothing else, it’s emblematic of the sinister cyberpunk sensibility that permeates the trailer.

Unlike the previous trailer, this one gives us our clearest indication yet of the direction the story is heading. After all, with a little over a month until the film hits theaters, it might be time to start giving audiences an idea of what they’re in for (apart from controversy over alleged whitewashing in the casting process). Scarlett Johansson stars as the Major, a cyborg police officer working with an elite counterterrorism unit known as Section 9 to stop the most dangerous cyberterrorists around. One of these terrorists is a man named Kuze, who seems to be both stalking the Major–all while taunting her about a past she can’t seem to remember–and cutting a bloody swath across the city. Yet as this game of cat-and-cybermouse gets increasingly deadly, it seems that the Major will have to face some uncomfortable truths that her employers–the fine folks of Section 9, including Takeshi Kitano as Chief Daisuke Aramaki and Juliette Binoche as Dr. Ouélet–seem to be hiding from her.

While the film seems to be blending aspects of the manga, the anime feature film, and the TV series, it does seem like Sanders is trying to remain faithful to the source material as much as possible. Case in point, at a trailer launch event in Tokyo last November, the filmmakers showed off the infamous shelling sequence in which the Major’s shell–the cyborg body into which her consciousness is implanted–is assembled, and it is shockingly close to the original animation.

Ghost in the Shell opens on March 31, 2017.

What do you think of the latest Ghost in the Shell trailer? Let us know in the comments below.

Image: Paramount

Dan Casey is the senior editor of Nerdist and the author of books about Star Wars and the Avengers. Follow him on Twitter (@Osteoferocious).