The director, Isabel Coixet, has lent the images a peculiar texture. Half the film seems to involve panes of glass, the shiny walls of elevators, or mirrors of one sort or another. If possible they're fogged up or their transparency is lessened by patches of raindrops. Like the heroine, Sophie Turner, you're sometimes not sure of what you're seeing. But, thank God, no directorial razzle dazzle. The camera moves only when it should and there are few whiz-bangs on the sound track.
Turner is a teen-ager in a British school. Her taciturn father is bound to a wheelchair. Her mother, she discovers, is having an affair with one of the school's teachers.
The central theme is that Turner feels a Doppelgänger is following her about, sometimes taking her place at home or elsewhere. You have to love the idea of the double, someone who looks enough like you to confuse others. It goes back to Edgar Allan Poe and comes down to us through various channels. Any theme that is so popular can't be all bad.
I once had a call from someone with exactly my name who lived near me in Philadelphia, complaining that he was getting midnight phone calls from my friends and asking me to tell them to stop it. I felt compelled to ask the guy out for dinner and he was my age, resembled me in his somatotype, and, indeed, was "Robert John Maxwell, Ph.D.," just as the midnight callers had asked, only he was a chemist not an anthropologist. I couldn't take my eyes off the guy at the restaurant. If he lifted a forkful of food, I followed it. Eerie, I'll tell you.
Well -- I see I went slightly off the track there, but if I had a Doppelgänger like Poe's "William Wilson," he'd have reined me in pronto.
The treatment of the story seems kind of sluggish at times. And I don't think it's all that well written. Sometimes it seemed as if the writers didn't know exactly where they wanted the story to go. Yes, Sophie Turner could be imagining things. As a counselor tells her, she has a crippled father, and "sometimes a trauma induces another trauma," whatever that means. But then again, others see this double too at times. So Turner can't be imagining her experiences. Then her mother tells her that she'd had an identical twin who died and was buried. Where the hell did that come, and why? We find out at the end, but the end makes no sense. It's as if the writers had thrown up their hands and simply given up.
That's too bad because, as I say, it's a juicy and fruitful theme. Alfred Hitchcock did a marvelous job with it on one of this television programs, "The Case of Mister Pelham." There was no more logic to it than in this film but the ending was satisfying because it was a reasonable culmination of everything that had happened before. Sadly, that sense of completion is missing here.
Turner is a teen-ager in a British school. Her taciturn father is bound to a wheelchair. Her mother, she discovers, is having an affair with one of the school's teachers.
The central theme is that Turner feels a Doppelgänger is following her about, sometimes taking her place at home or elsewhere. You have to love the idea of the double, someone who looks enough like you to confuse others. It goes back to Edgar Allan Poe and comes down to us through various channels. Any theme that is so popular can't be all bad.
I once had a call from someone with exactly my name who lived near me in Philadelphia, complaining that he was getting midnight phone calls from my friends and asking me to tell them to stop it. I felt compelled to ask the guy out for dinner and he was my age, resembled me in his somatotype, and, indeed, was "Robert John Maxwell, Ph.D.," just as the midnight callers had asked, only he was a chemist not an anthropologist. I couldn't take my eyes off the guy at the restaurant. If he lifted a forkful of food, I followed it. Eerie, I'll tell you.
Well -- I see I went slightly off the track there, but if I had a Doppelgänger like Poe's "William Wilson," he'd have reined me in pronto.
The treatment of the story seems kind of sluggish at times. And I don't think it's all that well written. Sometimes it seemed as if the writers didn't know exactly where they wanted the story to go. Yes, Sophie Turner could be imagining things. As a counselor tells her, she has a crippled father, and "sometimes a trauma induces another trauma," whatever that means. But then again, others see this double too at times. So Turner can't be imagining her experiences. Then her mother tells her that she'd had an identical twin who died and was buried. Where the hell did that come, and why? We find out at the end, but the end makes no sense. It's as if the writers had thrown up their hands and simply given up.
That's too bad because, as I say, it's a juicy and fruitful theme. Alfred Hitchcock did a marvelous job with it on one of this television programs, "The Case of Mister Pelham." There was no more logic to it than in this film but the ending was satisfying because it was a reasonable culmination of everything that had happened before. Sadly, that sense of completion is missing here.