DOUBLE VISION (Taiwan, 2002)
: : New York Premiere : :


113 minutes, 35mm, in Mandarin and English with English subtitles
Directed by: Chen Kuo-fu
Starring: Tony Leung Kar-fai, David Morse, Rene Liu

We've seen this before. A Chinese cop and an American cop get paired up to solve a crime! Could it be RUSH HOUR? Sure, if RUSH HOUR started guzzling fistfulls of Prozac. You've got Tony Leung Kar-fai (THE LOVER) playing a disgraced cop, and David Morse (THE GREEN MILE, PROOF OF LIFE) playing one of those cookie cutter FBI serial killer profiler guys who's sent to Taiwan to help investigate that country's first serial killer case, but this time it's all different.

The director is Chen Kuo-fu, one of Taiwan's great art film auteurs whose THE PERSONALS recently received critical acclaim in the US. And David Morse's Great White Specialist mostly flounders around, stuck in the miasmal hell-swamp of Taiwan's scorching summer and in the relentless pull of Tony's depression. Sleeping in his office, Tony hasn't been home since he exposed a colleague's corruption, earning department-wide hatred. Now he's pickled in self-loathing, trying to pluck up the courage to kill himself.

And the serial killings? They don't even seem to be the work of a human being. The investigation quickly spirals out of control as science and religion go at each other's throats and director Chen films the carnage. Diving deep into stagnant waters, this is the most relentless vision of a burnt-out world since SE7EN. A cold and clammy horror movie that grimly literalizes the five Taoist hells, DOUBLE VISION features more than one jaw-dropping sucker punch to the nerve endings. Here, science and religion are both malignant tumors that kill everything they touch. Think of it as a cultural autopsy, dripping with sweat, blood and regret.

> The official DOUBLE VISION web site: www.doublevisionmovie.com