Double Lover

Although this is a riveting, spectacular, wholly engaging thriller, upon reflection we can conclude that almost everything that happens is in heroine Chloe’s mind. 

One key pointer is the surreal museum in which she works as a guard. The ex-model — an object of vision — now watches people. The setting is where people read the art around them for improved understanding of themselves and life. The “Blood and Flesh” exhibition, the monstrous sculpture of overhead roots, the gallery’s vast white spaces, the sculptures that anticipate the fetus-like cysts later removed from Chloe’s womb, all point to the fantasy element in her psychodrama. 

In the pre-credit shot she is having her hair cut. She transforms herself into a more androgynous look. Her hair covers her eyes, then is trimmed to expose them. Her androgyny anticipates her later using a dildo on husband Paul.

The action opens on her medical exam, first with a shot of a vagina, then a close-up of her eye, registering pain, perhaps tears. The establishing shot shows Chloe in the stirrups, her doctor peering between Chloe’s legs. This establishes her central tensions: her sexuality and her vision of herself. When she goes to her first psychiatric appointment she climbs a vertiginous eye-like spiralling staircase. 

The stomach pains her doctor can’t explain turns out to be a psychological issue around her womb. Chloe is a divided psyche, harbouring a profound sense that she consumed the twin in the womb when she was born. For that she is driven to punish herself.The cause isn’t known until she herself is found to have a fetus-like cyst beside the fetus in her own womb.

Her relationship with therapist Paul operates on the level of event. But his twin brother, fellow shrink and more violent, effective and punishing lover Louis is Chloe’s projection. She imputes to Paul the divided and conflicted self she herself bears. That elaborates her admission that “When you look at me that way, I feel I exist.” 

So, too, her mother is doubled by the Madame Schenker she imagines visiting, who discloses the supposed twins’ ruin of her innocent daughter Sandra (whom Chloe also sees as herself).    

Minor doublings abound. The same actor plays Chloe’s gynaecologist and the therapist Dr Wexler she claims to visit. The imagined Madame Schenker is herself doubled by Chloe’s neighbour Rose, another woman with an invalid daughter, the girl’s bedroom frozen in time, with cats both stuffed and statues to echo Chloe’s missing Milo. Louis’ office is a glossier double of Paul’s, unrealistically opening into the bedroom for his advanced therapy. Chloe in particular is often shown with her doubling reflections off windows and mirrors. 

The Christmas party discussion of phantom twins explains Chloe’s sense of having absorbed a sibling in the womb. The background of American pop songs concludes with a particularly pointed lyric, sung by Elvis Presley. Presley himself admitted to a lifelong connection to his twin brother Aron, who died at birth. 
     The film itself has a doubled kind of twin. It’s adapted from a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, which David Cronenberg filmed as Dead Ringers.