DOPPELGANGER (Japan, 2003)
Directed by: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Starring: Koji Yakusho, Hiromi Nagasaku, Yusuke Santamaira

“…by directorial juijitsu, [Kiyoshi Kurosawa] uses the techniques of naturalism to create a dreamlike realm of pure psychodrama…”

— Mark Schilling, Japan Times

The concept of the doppelganger has seduced writers like Goethe, Edgar Allan Poe and now arthouse horror auteur, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who makes a play for the (semi-) mainstream by packing an entire season of The Twilight Zone into his latest film and exploding it all over the audience with a dark and gleeful splootch! Winning raves on the festival circuit, DOPPELGANGER finds Kurosawa regular, Koji Yakusho (Cure, Pulse, Shall We Dance?) playing a stressed-out medical engineer designing a robot chair for the disabled on a tight deadline. The pressure’s getting to him, and before you can say "As the World Turns," his doppelganger shows up and starts ruining everything in that wonderful way only an evil twin is can really pull off. Kurosawa directs with his trademark creeping unease but this time the high concept is intellectual popcorn and he's having a blast wolfing it down and deploying, with greasy fingers, a fireworks display of out-of-control disco balls, slo-mo car chases, rampaging trucks, awkward seductions and multiplying doppelgangers.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa made his mark with the horror films Cure, Pulse, and Charisma. Right before DOPPELGANGER he released his jellyfish-infestation flick, Bright Future, which premiered at Cannes in 2003 and fired up critics with a rosy glow of artsy befuddlement. But DOPPELGANGER eschews experimentalism and embraces its trashy/brainy identity as a rollicking roller coaster for the intelligentsia. Kurosawa has always excelled at taking fantastical “what if” scenarios, literalizing them and watching them play themselves out in the real world. In Pulse he realized that the only logical conclusion to a horror movie about creeping evil was the end of the world, and in DOPPELGANGER he’s fascinated by exactly how life would work if your evil twin showed up. Would he want attention? Credit? Just to hang around a lot? To take over your job? To write a book? DOPPELGANGER is a comedy of bad manners, and Kurosawa gets maximum mileage out of watching protocol-obsessed office drones grapple with the etiquette of addressing a doppelganger.


Using a split screen like a violinist uses a Stradivarius, Kurosawa directs with all the panache of a man at the helm of an off-kilter summer blockbuster. And giving the performance of his career, Koji Yakusho does enough amazingly precise acting to fill up two performances. And in DOPPELGANGER, that’s exactly what he does.