I Watch Films: Body Double

 

Body Double (1984)

Jake Scully is an actor in Los Angeles; while playing a vampire in a film he has an attack of claustrophobia. At an acting class the tutor bullies him in an effort at method acting; Sam Bouchard intervenes. Later Scully finds himself fired and his girlfriend is cheating on him. Bouchard offers him a place to stay.

A rich friend of Bouchard has gone on a trip to Europe and needs a housesitter and Bouchard is going out of town. It’s on a hill, kind of space-age, very luxurious (for 1984). Bouchard points out a telescope and tells him to look; every evening at the same time a woman strips out of her clothes and does a dance in the building opposite.

Scully learns her name, Gloria Revelle, and sees her being abused by a man. The next day he follows her. She goes shopping, buying underwear, discarding the pair she was wearing in a bin, which Scully retrieves. She makes phone calls promising to meet someone. A mysterious man, an “Indian” as the film calls him, follows her. She continues to the beach where she’s attacked by the Indian who steals her purse. Scully chases him into a tunnel where his claustrophobia overwhelms him.

That night the Indian enters the building opposite and attacks Gloria. Scully tries to intervene, but when he enters her apartment he’s attacked by a dog. Gloria is killed with a drill in quite a horrid sequence. When the police come they think it’s a robbery gone wrong, initially disbelieving Scully, then when they discover Gloria’s underwear thinking him a suspect.

Depressed, Scully watches late night pornography on the TV and sees Holly Body do exactly the same dance that Gloria did. Holly has different hair but otherwise resembles Gloria closely. He goes to the studios where Holly works and gets hired as a porn actor. Questioning her he discovers she was hired to do her dance in the apartment opposite in the wig and realises he’s been set up to provide some sort of alibi or be the suspect or something. Holly wants nothing to do with it; she leaves, only to be picked up by a stranger. Scully follows to where he finds a man in a mask digging a grave. Inevitably he is trapped in the grave like at the start of the film and has to overcome his claustrophobia.

An homage to some of Hitchcock’s famous thrillers, voyeurism, doubles, extremely convoluted plots and so forth, brought forward to a sleazy 1980s vibe. This does not make sense but does have some tension and mystery to it, though it keeps piling on a lot of coincidental details. Weird if stylish erotic thriller.

Watch This: Cunning, paranoid mystery
Don’t Watch This: Convoluted to the point of nonsense, revels in sleaze