Polaris_DiB Director Shinya Tsukamoto of Tetsuo fame returns with something very different than his hyperkinetic cyborg technophilia mindtrip: an almost sober costume drama cum doppelganger thriller. This man has versatility, I must say.Now the story is decent, though not as great as it could have been. As strange occurrences and the feeling of an alien presence start plaguing a successful doctor's life, he suddenly gets trapped at the bottom of a well while a mysterious person who looks just like him takes over his life, including his house and his wife. Through dialog and flashbacks we learn that the mystery man is his long-lost brother, abandoned by his family because of a snake-shaped deformity on his leg. After he got separated with his wife Rin, he searched for her to find that Rin had married the successful doctor twin. Wanting revenge for his rejection from society, plus to get back at and back together with his old wife, the stranger decides to taunt his doctor brother by forcing him into the most abject of conditions.It's not particularly effective for horror or thriller approach, but it is a good movie in the way the one actor plays the double roles and the color and movement Tsukamoto captures. Apparently he hired actors from a certain local theatre to play the roles, and the approach they have to their characters is certainly very physical: the doppelganger and Rin snake around each other while making love, the way he cartwheels around to scare the brothers' mother, the level of distortion each character puts on their face in order to project their emotion. Add an extremely acute focus on costuming and you get something almost out of Noh theatre: demonic expressiveness, bright colorful motifs, paced and structured movements.--PolarisDiB

dbborroughs Shinya Tsukamoto, the man behind the Tetsuo films, Snake of June and Tokyo Fist takes on Edogawa Rampo story and turns in one of the most perfect marriages of sound and image I've ever run across not to mention one of the creepiest films I've seen in a very very long time.Yukio is a famous doctor who won fame treating the war wounded. He is much in demand by the wealthy and so has little time for the poor in a nearby slum where the plague has been running rampant. Yukio is also recently married to a young woman he met by the riverside and who is suffering from amnesia.Soon a dark figure is lurking about and after Yukio's father dies under mysterious and unnatural circumstances things begin to take a turn for the worse.What can I say? This is a creepy little thriller that will haunt you and keep you feeling off balance. Every shot seems to have been perfectly designed for maximum beauty. The soundtrack is a wonderful mixture of sound and music calculated to give the sense of things being not right. The effect of the sound plus the image is a sense of dread and unease even when there is nothing out of the ordinary in the frame, few thrillers or horror films have ever been able to make you feel so off by doing so little.Adding to it all is the plot which I'm told takes the Rampo story as a jumping off point and then spins it out with new complications. Give it big points for its ability to keep you guessing as to what is going on even if you know whats going on. Having read on the film I knew what was happening and yet I still had to entertain numerous other possibilities. This movie masterfully makes you wonder about what is real and what is not.I really liked this movie great deal. I don't know if its fully on its own terms or simply that its not another Japanese or Asian horror film with a long hair female ghost lurking about, honestly I don't care because the film is just so damn good it wouldn't really matter anyway.See this movie.

Infofreak I was incredibly impressed by Shinya Tsukamoto's surreal cyberpunk classic 'Tetsuo', one of the most startling, original and disturbing movies of the last twenty years, and also knocked out by 'Tokyo Fist' his hyperkinetic and violent study of macho competition. Now, once again I'm impressed, this time by 'Gemini' his beautiful and haunting story of identity confusion, and sibling rivalry. The movie is said to be based on Edogawa Rampo's short story 'The Twins', but I've read it and it has virtually nothing to do with this film. Whatever, it doesn't matter, Tsukamoto has taken one or two ideas from Rampo's (excellent) story and expanded it into more interesting and inventive territory. Masahiro Motoki is brilliant in a duel role as the uptight bourgeois doctor and his malevolent criminal twin, and Ryo is beautifully enigmatic as his (apparently) amnesiac wife who is harboring a secret or two. 'Gemini' is a brilliant piece of film making, and I highly recommend it.

Bishonen A film of extremes."Tetsuo" and its sequel were ripping bouts of cinematic mayhem. This film, "Gemini", represents a stunning turnabout for the director who applies a sure, delicate hand to an unnerving mystery.A doctor in 1910 Japan lives a seemingly perfect life; he is handsome, he is married to a beautiful (albeit perplexing and inscrutable) woman and he is a renowned doctor.The deaths of his parents send the doctor down a spiral of madness and violence. His wife grows more distant and enigmatic. He loses his grip on reality but the nightmarish events seem to spring from his own hand...Frequently the imagery is rigorously symmetrical, composed with a great deal of poetry and ethereal beauty. Many of the shots are masterpieces of Japanese design. The effect is like a spiderweb where all the strands are perfectly aligned and no two edges seem to deviate from the basic construction. Even in the most tranquil image, the director creates a sense of palpable menace, as though the air is tinged with the smells of blood and gore even though the shot may be of a perfectly kept garden.On this elegant framework the director lays on stunning moments of violence and revelatory mayhem. Besides the visceral elements, there is a great deal of psychic violence in the film. The audience witnesses the mental descent of the doctor so delicately and precisely that it seems that we can see the hairs rising on the back of his neck.An unsettling and very rewarding film.