A flare-up of urban paranoia that spells out the chanciness of shopping for a roommate in the classifieds: you could wind up with one half of a set of twins, who holds herself responsible for the death in childhood of the other half, and who still seeks to find a replacement for that half, and who in order to do so will go to the lengths of buying clothes identical to yours, cutting and dyeing her hair like yours, stealing and reading your mail, erasing your messages on the phone-answering machine, crawling into bed with and going down on your boyfriend, lying, murdering, tying and gagging. But at least she might also do her share of the cleaning, otherwise known as fingerprint-wiping. The one area where director Barbet Schroeder places himself outside the commercial mainstream (or else the superb photographer Luciano Tovoli places him there) is in the look of the movie. Its color tends to be soft but not smeary, tastefully toned-down but not tyranically trampled, and the shadow work inside the grand and spacious Victorian apartment house (much too grand and spacious for the digs of a fledgling career woman) is of a jungly density seldom seen since the demise of black-and-white. All of this can make you forgive quite a lot, even ignore quite a lot. But the climactic cat-and-mouse game (sudden-death triple overtime) between Bridget Fonda (unaffected, believable) and Jennifer Jason Leigh (affected, unbelievable) uses up all allotment of forgiveness. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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