Double Walker: The Rape-Revenge Genre Takes a Ghostly Turn

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-minus

Imagine Emerald Fennell’s rape-revenge thriller Promising Young Woman, but with a ghost – one corporeal enough to kill with a spoon.

Micro-budgeted horror films like Colin West’s Double Walker appeal to the writer in me. The production values are nothing to write home about, there are practically no effects. Everything depends on the story and the acting. (Also, you usually don’t have to worry about the movie turning out to be unnecessarily long. This one clocks in at a bite-sized 71 minutes).

Double Walker’s story is feverishly imaginative, though its internal logic often doesn’t hold up. But the star and co-writer Sylvie Mix is committed to her story, playing a mostly silent, seductive (often nakedly so) phantom who “can only be seen by believers and sinners.”

For what it’s worth, Double Walker is also an interesting addition to the list of Christmas-themed horror movies (is it that time of year already?).

Wrapped interstitially around scenes on an old TV of Scrooge, the 1935 version of A Christmas Carol (because, y’know, public domain), Double Walker opens at a funeral where a grief-stricken woman (Maika Carter) shows her contempt for the season by angrily overturning a Christmas tree.

Cut to the semi-frozen woods, where a young man named Brian (Justin Rose) is walking his dog. When the dog wanders, Brian finds him being petted by a barely-dressed, luminescently attractive young woman. Realizing she’s in danger of frostbite (and for some reason, not cognizant of the fact that someone in that situation might be in need of mental help at, say, a hospital), he takes her home to warm her up, as it were.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

This is a mistake, obviously. But what’s interesting if you’re comparing Double Walker to Promising Young Woman is its lack of moral straight lines. Yes, she’s targeting men who’ve done wrong in her dim past (think low-rent Jeffrey Epsteins). But her entry point is often an act of kindness on their part. At one point, she kills someone who isn’t part of her agenda and doesn’t deserve to die.

Even the last act, which is supposed to lead to some sort of happy ending, is morally ambiguous.

The Ghost’s story is filled-in in brief bits of narration. Seems she remembers as a child being in the trunk of a car, and then being faced by dark apparitions, who offer her a choice – one last day as a human, or immortality as a wanderer, invisible to all save for the aforementioned believers and sinners. For unclear reasons, she chooses the latter.

There must be a lot of none-of-the-aboves, since at one point, she sits at the family dinner table of a police detective named Sharron (Darryl A Wright), who’s investigating her various killings, with only Sharron’s son able to see his “invisible friend.”

Continuity is not the movie’s strong suit. The Ghost apparently dies as a child, but awakens spectrally as a young woman (the better to seduce victims?). She talks at one point about having outlived everyone she ever knew, but her mother is alive, and not that much older than she was during the events that caused all this.

But the sustained mood and soundtrack keeps Double Walker watchable and tense. Plus, there’s the addition of an actual good Samaritan with no lascivious agenda, an indie theatre owner named Jack (Jacob Rice), who has the Ghost rethinking her initial decision. The schlubby and likeable Jack softens the movie to where it almost qualifies as a love story. 

Double Walker. Directed and co-written by Colin West. Stars Sylvie Mix, Justin Rose and Darryl A Wright. Debuts on VOD, Friday, November 12.