young woman named Yuka (Nagasaku) sees her kid brother Takashi in a parking lot where she doesn't expect him to be. She offers him a ride home, but he declines. At home, Takashi is plopped in front of the TV—could she have mistaken the boy in the parking lot for her brother? Yuka gets a call informing her that her brother—who always wanted to be a novelist, but never had the nerve to actually write anything—is dead. Yuka hears the sound of fast, furious and determined typing coming from her brother's room....
Uptight med-tech company Research and Development guy Michio Hayasaki (Yakusho) is having a bummer of a mid-life crisis. Despite his resounding successes earlier in his career, he's stuck in a creative and intellectual slump. He's working on an "artificial body" for disabled persons—a wheelchair-like device with articulated "Doc Ock"-like arms that runs on the willpower of its occupant. Despite the fact that this is a dream project of his, he can't find the inspiration for the conceptual breakthrough that will make the artificial body work. Hayasaki's boss, Murakami (Emoto), is laying the old corporate hoop-jumping and politics routine on Hayasaki. Just as things get unbearable for Hayasaki, his exact double, his doppelgänger, barges into his life. "I came here because I felt sorry for you!" says his double, an insufferably charming and strong-willed cad who promptly trashes Hayasaki's lab and gets him fired.
With selves like this, who needs enemies? Hayasaki meets with Yuka, in the hope that he can salvage some part of his life that he now shares with a being that could be his best ally ... or worst foe ... or both.
"The Shoemaker and the Selves"
Doppelgänger begins as a very somber and dark horror movie. The opening sets a very nice, off-kilter, evocative tone. The film is huddled with subtle chills, with just enough unreality to be fantastic, while being believable enough to be disturbing in a fresh and startling way. The moment when Hayasaki first encounters his double is shocking because it's a moment of deadpan horror ... a matter-of-fact presentation of freakish otherness. This is a remarkable feat, given the extent to which the doppelgänger has been beaten to death, from Twilight Zone to The Man Who Haunted Himself to The Dark Half.
Incredibly, without missing a beat in terms of pacing, tone or characterization, Doppelgänger morphs from deadpan horror to ... deadpan comedy! Doppelgänger, with the wicked malice and charm of Hayasaki's double, shakes off its patina of horror to become a dark satire of a middle-aged rut: American Beauty as written by John Webster and Rod Serling. Hayasaki's double is free to do all the things that Hayasaki's position and age won't allow him to do. The double, like the sprites from "The Shoemaker and The Elves," really does help Hayasaki while he's not looking. Of course, this "help" involves murder, theft and mayhem, but the double does free Hayasaki from his figurative paralysis ... and in this context, Hayasaki's project to create a device that frees the paralyzed through application of will goes from SF trope to spiffy metaphor.
Kôji Yakusho's performance(s) are nothing short of remarkable. Through posture and body language alone, viewers can always tell when he is playing Hayasaki or the double. Though not entirely successful, with quite a few dead spots and plot holes, Doppelgänger is a witty pile-up of horror, SF and satire that no genre fan looking for something fresh should miss.
