Photocopy
2023 · 13m
Directed by Mike Klubeck
Genres: horror, sci-fi, thriller
A man keeps seeing his doppelganger all around the city, and they say meeting your double is a sign of impending doom.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The doppelganger-as-doom setup feels like horror by checklist—a premise everyone's seen in a dozen forms—but Klubeck doesn't seem interested in subverting it, which makes it weirdly inert for a short that should be unsettling.
There's a lineage here worth tracing—the double as uncanny mirror, Dostoevsky through Siodmak through contemporary horror—but the film doesn't quite earn its place in that conversation; the editing and formal language feel functional rather than considered.
The decision to ground the doppelganger encounters in mundane city spaces, with an escalating visual repetition that mirrors the protagonist's psychological collapse, is where this lives—that choice transforms a familiar premise into something genuinely disorienting on a small budget.
Festivals
- Spooktacular Film Festival 2023, Official Selection