Double Lover

Double Lover is a 2017 film from France.  It was released in the States in 2018, and I screened it at the Parkway theater in Baltimore.  Based loosely on a Joyce Carol Oates short story, Double Lover is a kinky romance thriller drama.  It's almost a Fifty Shades approach to the thriller, building on the stronger dominating and controlling male force, While it didn't take on the same type of murderous or suspenseful thriller of a Hitchcock type film, aside from some of the stair visual effects, Double Lover was a fast paced cryptic approach to human nature and the doctor/patient relationship.

While I feel like the movie took liberties with the approach of relationships between the doctor and patient to questionable levels, the movie drastically also worked towards a split screen type and other visual enhancements to add to the hair raising approach to the storyline.

Chloe, is a 25 year old young woman suffering from abdominal pains and has stares that could eat your soul.  While there was no set physical diagnosis for the causes of her stomach pains, she is then referred to Paul Meyer, for therapy sessions.  The early stages of the film, Chloe prattles on in oddly cut scenes of her distant mother, struggles with relationships, overall loneliness of growing up as an only child, her complex anxieties, and strange often demon-ish dreams.  These almost soliloquy type monologues in the movie are often used in a split screen type approach, fading and dissolving techniques are also used in a matter to build the suspense of the film, rather than the typical environmental or behavioral ticks so commonly seen in a Hitchock film, making Double Lover more reminiscent of the classic 1980's thrillers from Europe, with more modern techniques and pizzazz.

The climax of Chloe's sessions with Dr. Meyer, is when she lands a cushy flexible hour security guard job at a museum and as she proclaims in a session that she's finally starting to feel good and confident, due to the sessions.  Upon this proclamation, Meyer claims that it be best if they conclude their sessions due to his unorthodox feelings towards her.  A few months progress in the film, and viewers are aware of the budding relationship, progressing into the moving in stages.  As Chloe and Paul start the process, she uncovers a box of his belongings only to have questions arise, why does he have a passport with the name Paul Delong, and who is the unidentified boy in his childhood pictures.

This is when the plot thickens and begins the theatrics of oddball plot twists to deepen the thriller approach.  In order to answer those questions, I would then spoil the movie, which I don't like to do for others, especially when it comes to thrillers.  As previously stated, it's based on a short story of Joyce Carol Oates, the Lives of Twins, which she wrote under the pseudonym Rosemund Smith. 

Chloe soon discovers that Paul has a "lost" twin brother, also a psychoanalyst, Louis DeLord.  Louis has a drastically different and more forceful approach to his methods.  In much more prodded and stiff original meetings, DeLong claims he can cure Chloe of her frigid and stodgy approaches to relationships.  The mirrors, and mirrors with in mirrors, camera work, staircases, and visually skewed approaches and haunting exhibits seen in the museum, the viewer is thrown deeply into the depths of a psychological thriller.

Having seen Kaladiscope earlier this year, I could appreciate the faceted camera work, the split screens and the other worldy cat and wood scenes which in it's own right, made this an interesting attempt into the the thriller genre.