The film starts with a party at an asylum. The doctor who heads the asylum
is doing a magic act. His lovely assistant, Lou Doillon, is helping. Chloe
Sevigny, a journalist trying to expose the doctor for abusing kids and
performing experiments on them, has crashed the party in a clown outfit. The
final main character is a young doctor who has heard about the event and
volunteered to help.
The head doctor unmasks Chloe and has her thrown out, then we see him fighting
with Lou Doillon, after which the young doctor drives Doillon home and sleeps
with her. The next day, he leaves to get Doillon and her twin sister a cake,
comes back to the apartment, and is stabbed to death. It seems that Lou
Doillon was part of a pair of Siamese twins. Her sister died during
separation, and ever since then Doillon switches between her good character
and her sister's evil one. Or is it the other way around?
Chloe Sevigny witnesses the murder, and tries to convince the police to
believe her.
Maybe that's what happened. Maybe not. If any of the above plot summary is
wrong, I wouldn't be surprised, since this film is purposely inaccessible and
opaque. Director Douglas Buck proudly exclaimed in the commentary that the
film was designed to be ambiguous, especially at the end. While it is
categorized as a horror film, and is theoretically a remake of Brian de Palma's 1973 film of
the same name, it plays more like a particularly dense Italian giallo, a genre
the writer/director was trying to emulate.
This is not a film I will watch again.
If you are not familiar with our grading system, you need to
read the
explanation, because the grading is not linear. For example, by
our definition, a
C is solid and a C+ is a VERY good movie. There are very few Bs
and As. Based on our descriptive system, this film is a:
