Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Doppelganger Review

Though he is not yet well known in the western world Japanese genre-auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa looms large in the Japanese industry. Getting his start with low budget straight to video fare Kurosawa quickly built a name for himself with his deconstructionist takes on horror and yakuza films and is now considered one of the top three or four directors in his home country. It’s only a matter of time before word gets out world wide … his ghost apocalypse Kairo was purchased for a western remake, atmospheric supernatural serial killer flick Cure won critical raves world wide, and his aimless youth film Bright Future is currently winning widespread praise in a limited US theatrical release. And now the fledgling US arm of the Tartan Asia Extreme DVD label is bringing his latest – Doppelganger – to our home shores.

Doppelganger stars Kurosawa regular Koji Yakusho – perhaps best known for his role in the original Japanese Shall We Dance – as Hayasaki, a high strung medical technology researcher who begins to be haunted by a doppelganger, an exact physical replica of himself.

Under the eye of a more typical director this would quickly devolve into standard slasher fare but Kurosawa is far from typical. He is a man whose love for genre film is bested only by his love for subverting those same genre expectations. In Kurosawa’s world Hayashi’s doppelganger is more than a grim omen of death – legend states that anyone who sees their double will soon die – but rather the embodiment of all the repressed aspects of Hayashi’s character. As the film progresses we witness Hayashi’s initial attempts to deny and ignore what is happening, his gradual acceptance, his early attempts at manipulating the double for his own benefit, and his final attempts to suppress and destroy his double when it begins to become troublesome. More interestingly the doppelganger is itself a fully formed character and we witness its reactions to Hayashi.

With this film Kurosawa has taken the inner conflict that lies in all people – that constant pull between responsibility and desire - and drawn it right out into the open, into the physical world. It poses a fascinating question: if you had the chance to kill – literally, physically kill – those parts of yourself that you dislike, what would you do? And if those parts were to rebel and fight back, what then?

There are some horrific elements here, yes, but, as is the case with virtually all of Kurosawa’s work, attaching that label to it would be to grossly oversimplify what’s really going on and, in the process, likely alienate a great many viewers. Rather than creating a horror film, Kurosawa has taken a question and scenario that has been used to launch many a horror title and spun off in his own unique direction with it. Wedded to the bizarre situation are some serious psychological and philosophical elements and a bitingly dark sense of humor. While he tends to be labeled a horror director it is more accurate to say that Kurosawa is a genre unto himself. There is no other film maker out there quite like Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and thus no film quite like Doppelganger.

As is most often the case it falls to lead actor Koji Yakusho to anchor Kurosawa’s film in reality. This is the sort of film that will succeed or fail entirely on the strength of the lead performance and, as he has been in five previous Kurosawa-directed films, Yakusho is stellar. His Hayashi is a tightly wound perfectionist, slowly breaking down under the pressure of his own high expectations and his failing research, and lashing out at all those around him. When the doppelganger appears he is Hayashi’s polar opposite: loose, relaxed and irresponsible. What is fascinating is watching Yakusho embody both of these things. There’s a difficult balance he has to maintain here because while Hayashi and his double are polar opposites they are also aspects of the same person and it is up to Yakusho to find both the differences and similarities. Even more impressive is that Yakusho never gets to play the two parts off of each other: even at their most confrontational and most physical Yakusho is acting into empty space – first one role, then the other, with the results later composited together. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to make a scene believable both physically and emotionally in this sort of environment but Yakusho pulls it off without a hitch.

Which brings us to the technical end of things … Kurosawa shot Doppelganger, like his previous Bright Future, entirely on digital video. This has both its advantages and its drawbacks. On the one hand Doppelganger’s visuals show the limits of the technology as it is not as strikingly lit as the bulk of Kurosawa’s work, and the resolution is not as fine. On the other hand the digital format allows Kurosawa to employ all sorts of technical tricks flawlessly. Though he does not often rely on visual effects Kurosawa is very skilled at employing them appropriately and seamlessly when required – see the falling scene or the ghost effects in Kairo for proof – and he does so here. The digital composites used to double Yakusho on screen are simply perfect and are so tightly controlled that Kurosawa is even able to employ camera pans and scans that are typically an absolute no-go when composites are being used. The digital format also allows Kurosawa to further experiment with the use of multiple, simultaneously running visual windows on screen – a technique he first explored with Bright Future and pushes to a further, and very effective, extreme here.

As for the DVD itself this may just be the definitive release worldwide, and it certainly is for English speaking viewers. The transfer is clean and good quality; audio – including a fairly unnecessary DTS track – is solid; the disc features a lengthy making-of feature taking us through the entire production, and there is also a solid interview with Kurosawa himself discussing his approach to the film and what he hoped to accomplish. Though Doppelganger sits slightly behind both Cure and Bright Future in my own personal ranking of Kurosawa’s films it is certainly not far behind and Tartan has treated it right. Recommended on all counts.