Gemini

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
1999

Soseiji | Gemini
Shinya Tsukamoto
JAPAN, 1999
84 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Sedic International
Executive Producer: Toshiaki Nakazawa
Producer: Futoshi Nishimura
Screenplay: Shinya Tsukamoto
Cinematographer: Shinya Tsukamoto
Editor: Shinya Tsukamoto Production Designer: Takashi Sasaki
Sound: Kenji Shibazaki
Music: Chu Ishikawa
Principal Cast: Masahiro Motoki, Ryo, Yasutaka Tsutsui, Shiho Fujimura, Akaji Maro
Production: Sedic International

For Shinya Tsukamoto’s many fans, Gemini may come as something of a surprise. A costume drama set in the early part of this century, the film has a formal quality surprisingly close to a period melodrama of the forties. On the other hand, it’s also a psychopathic twins horror film complete with bizarre murders and a very deep well, conveniently placed for imprisoning the wicked and unlucky.

Dr. Yukio Daitokuji is a successful doctor in a good Tokyo neighbourhood. He lives there with his father, mother and Rin, his beautiful new wife. The couple is happy, even if Rin is plagued by amnesia, denying her access to any information about her past. This mystery is compounded by their sense of being watched ... by something.

Their house is near a slum and a mysterious, rag-wearing man gradually begins killing off the family in increasingly gruesome ways. The terror takes on a new twist when Yukio is attacked and thrown into the dreaded well by a man identical in appearance to him. This man then gradually takes over the good doctor’s life while the rightful inhabitant starves at the well’s bottom. A battle for control looms.

It is difficult to emphasize how aesthetically different this film is from Tsukamoto’s past work. Almost Gothic compositions, a lot of silence, and strict attention to classical costume and music give the film an eerily epic flavour. Even the violence is shot in a radically different way, resembling Kon Ichikawa much more than the Tetsuo films.

Yet Gemini shares many of Tsukamoto’s recent preoccupations, especially his fascination, so viscerally expressed in Tokyo Fist and Bullet Ballet, with male rage and revenge in its most extreme form.
—Noah Cowan