If I noticed an actor in a movie who looked exactly like me, I’d laugh about it, but I’m not as deep as Jake Gyllenhaal. No, when that happens to him, he spirals into a whole world of angst and misery over it. He tries to contact the other guy. Makes desperate phone calls to him. Creeps everybody out. He eventually meets him and then things get really fucked up.
It all adds up to a thriller that plays like Alfred Hitchcock on cough syrup and lots of it. This is slow and strange and lit dark as if you’re viewing it through a layer of used hospital gauze. It doesn’t answer all of your questions—actually, I don’t think it answers ANY of them—and it leaves a lot open to interpretation. To get it, you’ve got to dissect this thing like it’s a frog in science class.
What’s the deal with the spiders? What’s going on in that weird opening scene? What the hell happens at the end? And what’s that upside-down naked lady with a monster head that we see for about thirty seconds supposed to mean?
I don’t know, but if you ask me, I think these two lookalikes are the same guy, separated somehow. One’s a history teacher and one’s a professional actor. Depending on how you view things, they’re both good liars. Maybe one guy is a nonexistent projection of the other guy’s secret fantasy life. Maybe this is about mental illness. Or this could be a science fiction thing where a man’s personality somehow got split in two. Maybe it’s something else that I missed because I had one too many shots of Maker’s Mark at the theater bar before the show.