With Kiyoshi Kurosawa's masterful Pulse (2001), the director-as well as the new Japanese horror movement that he'd helped to establish with earlier works like Sweet Home and Cure-seemed to hit a high-water mark. Where to go after striking a perfect balance between the frightening and philosophical? Doppelganger uses the classic supernatural theme of the double, à la Edgar Allan Poe, to generate harrowing amounts of dread and tension. But it's also a surprisingly funny and heartfelt work, held together by a dazzling dual role by Koji Yakusho, longtime Kurosawa collaborator and the star of Shall We Dance? Yakusho plays Michio Hayasaki, a medical researcher cracking under the stress of working on his latest invention: an “artificial human body chair.” This already troubled project is thrown into total chaos by the inexplicable arrival of Hayasaki's unruly, unscrupulous darker half. A web of sabotage, murder, and general misbehavior soon ensues. All the while, Kurosawa maintains his unique cinematic space, somewhere between Andrei Tarkovsky and Tobe Hooper, although Doppelganger adds psychological slapstick, reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman's script for Adaptation, to the mix. The result is a uniquely eccentric twist in Kurosawa's ongoing strategy to push the stuff of genre beyond itself.