Doppelgänger

Ostensibly a comedy, writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (co-writing with Takeshi Furusawa)'s Doppelgänger is, true to form, threaded with moments of skin-prickling, domestic horror. Premised on the sudden (not to mention inexplicable) appearance of several unusually determined dead ringers, who behave as if they powered solely by the feelings and desires that repressed people regularly choke down, Kurosawa's film largely concerns itself with Michio Hayasaki, a floundering robotics engineer, played by Koji Hashimoto. Middle-aged, single and socially timid, Hayasaki suffers beneath the kind of corporate deadlines that the clapped-out mechanical wheelchair he's obsessed with cannot possibly hope to meet. Quite unable to complete this extremely ambitious project, Hayasaki does eventually welcome the spitting image that lingers around his apartment into the fold, operating under the assumption that his productivity will now, effectively, be doubled. As it turns out, this mirror Hayasaki isn't particularly scrupulous or overly concerned with interpersonal niceties, preferring to live his strange little half-life in enormous, violent sweeps. The battle of wills between these two, clashing aspects steers Doppelgänger further and further into an amusing absurdity, one in which the film's otherwise firm sense of reality begins to buckle and break down the closer its characters limp to their finish.