Double Lover (2017)

François Ozon's Double Lover arrives with the confidence of a film that knows exactly which buttons it wants to press. Chloé, a former model with unexplained abdominal pain, falls for her psychoanalyst, moves in with him, and then discovers his identical twin, a sadistic mirror image who offers a different kind of therapy. The proceedings are sleek, cold, and unapologetically lurid. Ozon treats desire as a clinical condition, which is fitting for a story adapted from Joyce Carol Oates. The eroticism is genuine and the transgression is deliberate. A cross-dressing sex scene and the charged entanglement between the twins supply a queer texture that the film wears like a borrowed coat. It is decoration, not doctrine.

The feminist reading here is thin. Chloé has agency, or at least the appearance of it, but she exists primarily as a body on display and a receptacle for male pathology. The camera is not on her side. It is on the side of the spectacle. Psychiatry runs through every scene, and a viewer hoping for a considered treatment of mental life will find instead psychosomatic illness as plot device and a parasitic twin as the final punchline. The body, in this film, is something to be invaded, diagnosed, and cut open. There is no affirmation in that, only dread.

What remains is a chamber piece about identity, deception, and the twin as metaphor. It has no interest in race, class, climate, or history. It lectures no one. It is a French art-house thriller that wants to disturb and titillate in roughly equal measure, and it succeeds at both without ever pretending to improve its audience. A sommelier might call it a difficult vintage, all acid and no sweetness. It goes down sharp. Whether it lingers is another matter entirely.