Verdict
Summary
A simplistic, quiet horror film in the vein of The Crow without the style or the budget, Double Walker is an affecting indie genre film with a sad pallet and a half-baked idea of the afterlife and getting a glimpse of the griminess of a harsh reality and how to correct it.
Plot:
A ghost returns years after her murder to get revenge.
Review:
A wispy blonde-haired young woman (played by this film’s producer and co-writer Sylvie Mix) wearing nothing but an oversized white t-shirt appears in the woods one early evening while a man is walking his dog nearby. He sees her, realizes she must be freezing, and offers some help. She’s virtually silent, acting like a child, and the guy takes advantage of the situation. He takes her home, where he carefully navigates the oddness of the whole scenario. He takes her shirt off, and she stands there naked like a mermaid fresh with new legs right out of the sea, and this is either the dude’s luckiest day ever … or his worst nightmare. It turns out to be the latter, as she uses the moment of mute seduction to murder the guy right where he sits – using a spoon to slash him apart! She vanishes, and she ends up wandering the streets in her oversized shirt, barefoot, and naked underneath, and she sets her gaze on another guy and that’s when we realize that she’s a ghost and she’s stalking the men who killed her when she was a child. We get disorienting glimpses of her life on earth and her afterlife, and we sense that a group of men raped and killed her (I think, it’s never really that clear), and all the men were connected to her own father, an alcoholic abuser who chose Christmas morning to do something terrible to his family. The ghost does her thing with no emotion: She stalks her prey, sets the guys up, and kills them, and fate has her killing an innocent man, the father of a young guy who takes a shine to her one night when he sees her walking by the movie theater he works at. This young guy (played by Jacob Rice) is the flipside to all the abusers and horrible men the woman has encountered; he’s gentle, he’s kind, and he’s considerate, and she begins spending some time with him. They become friends, but not lovers, but when she realizes that it was his father that she killed on accident, she vanishes, never to be seen again. When her vengeance is complete, she looks over the past, the present, and the future, and it’s possible that she’s righted all the wrongs of her life before they ever began … or perhaps it’s not like that at all, and she’s just drifted through someone’s else’s idea of revenge.
A simplistic, quiet horror film in the vein of The Crow without the style or the budget, Double Walker is an affecting indie genre film with a sad pallet and a half-baked idea of the afterlife and getting a glimpse of the griminess of a harsh reality and how to correct it. Star Mix spends a lot of the film naked, but the movie’s lens carefully navigates around that fact with only glimpses of nudity, which is both frustrating and appropriate, considering that the movie clearly doesn’t want to be an exploitation effort. Maybe the movie should’ve gone the grindhouse route instead of the emo shoegazing path … it might’ve been more enjoyable. As it stands, it works on its own terms and doesn’t need me or anyone else to adjust it. From director Colin West.
Kino Lorber recently released Double Walker on Blu-ray, and it looks and sounds nice in high definition. No special features are included.
