Doppelgänger

Michio Hayasaki, a brilliant developer of medical instruments, is working on a robot chair, equipped with artificial limbs, for people who are completely paralysed. He feels he is being pressed by his employer Medical Cytech to come up with a successful design at short notice and he is in danger of burning out. Then, one evening, he thinks he sees his double. Hayasaki has the shock of his life: superstition suggests that meeting your double means you will soon die. But, after a confrontation with his maladjusted doppelgänger, it becomes clear that Hayasaki could take advantage of his violent tricks. The double reduces Hayasaki’s lab to rubble, clears another double out of the way, hires an assistant for Hayasaki and comes up with a new lab. But in the end, one of them will have to perish… In Doppelgänger the productive Kurosawa Kyoshi made a stylish horror film with supernatural apparitions and jet-black humour. Where his Bright Future (also screened at this festival) is more philosophical, Doppelgänger is a delicious combination of macabre horror and comic misunderstandings. Yakusho Koji, ‘regular’ actor in Kurosawa’s films, plays a wonderful double role and never leaves the viewer -at least not on purpose -guessing about the identity of his two protagonists. Kurosawa greatly enjoys the Mephisto theme and revels in inventive plot turns and a surprising use of split screen.