DOPPELGANGER (Dopperugengâ)

Dealing with a doppelganger becomes not so much a matter of fear, but one more akin to having a bad roommate.

Sometimes, when I'm watching a movie, I imagine a little meter in the lower left corner of my vision indicating how many slices it's looking like the film in question is going to receive. Oh, y'all, I wish you could have seen this meter last night. It was ALL OVER TOWN. It left town, went for a drink, and came back.

Doppelganger appears at first glance to be a standard Asian horror film—a genre I'm not the biggest fan of, as I discovered with The Eye. Dr. Michio Hayasaki (Koji Yakusho) has been working for years on a project called "The Artificial Body," a sort of mechanized wheelchair with robotic arms able to read the will of the disabled person and carry it out. Do you suppose this will come in sinisterly handy later? Well, you supposed wrong. Nothing comes of it. But wouldn't that have been interesting?

Anyway, Hayasaki encounters his doppelganger for no apparent reason and he starts causing all sorts of trouble—destroying Hayasaki's laboratory and getting him fired, for starters. But instead of following up on the horror conventions it has been laying SO DAMN THICK thus far, Doppelganger does a bizarre thing and strips Not!Hayasaki of all mystery, instead presenting him as a wisecracking asshole who does what he does because it's fun. Dealing with a doppelganger becomes not so much a matter of fear for Hayasaki, but one more akin to having a bad roommate.

Hayasaki contacts a young woman named Yuka (Hitomi Sato) whose brother killed himself when he encountered his doppelganger. Ever since, the doppelganger has been living in her home, writing a novel. Yuka tells Hayasaki matter-of-factly, "My brother was a weak-willed slacker. Frankly, I like the new Takashi better." Moments like this were clues that it was okay to laugh at this movie. Good thing, because the hilarious second half was practically Chaplinesque.

Doppelganger is not a good movie, except maybe as a screwball comedy, and who the hell knows if that's what it was trying to be. It seems to take itself so seriously at times that it's hard to believe it's really in on the joke. It has a close encounter with a good idea towards the end, but it's too little too late, and the film around it has, by this time, already collapsed into farce.

And yet, after finishing the film, I had a big, goofy grin on my face. I found that, despite some sluggish parts in the middle, I had a pretty good time. When it comes to the funny, Doppelganger delivers, whether or not it was the cargo the filmmakers intended.