Double Walker
“Double Walker” is an interesting case of exploring ideas like the burden of memory, death, and the choice of what would be most important in living a purposeful life. The way it’s told, there are questions to be raised on how effective this story is, but it’s nonetheless compelling.
The Ghost (Silvie Mix, who also wrote the story) is first seen with an older man. We don’t know that she’s a ghost yet, but she definitely looks too young for the man she’s with. Next thing we know, the man is dead, brutally murdered by the Ghost. She walks through town, mostly minding her business, but one day, she meets someone who works at the local movie theatre (Jacob Rice), and she feels close to humanity again.
Writer-director Colin West does a fine job creating creating a haunting and dream-like experience for the viewer. It feels a lot like David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story,” only not as isolated. One of the most important things about any story involving ghosts is what is the purpose for the ghost existing. Here, it feels as though it is intended as a choice offered to the main character- would you rather want to live one more day, or exist in the afterlife forever, witnessing the world but only being visible for those who believe? That the Ghost made the choice they do speaks a lot to their own feelings of connection to the living world anymore; that this sort of choice exists in the world of the film implies the conditional existence of the afterlife- if you choose the single day, does your soul simply disappear afterwards, no longer a part of the spiritual world? That might be one of the bleakest worldviews a film like this has ever presented.
The narrative is told in fractured structure- when we aren’t watching the Ghost around town, we see her with a distraught mother, whose daughter has just died. The implication is that the daughter is the Ghost, but we never see any scenes of the daughter being the same age as the Ghost. Is this meant to reflect that the girl is older in her mind than her age? Or are we watching the key memory that led to her death? Or is she even the daughter herself? That’s never really answered and it probably should have been more directly. What’s implied is akin to the death of the main character in “The Lovely Bones,” except here, they have a direct impact on the revenge sought, bringing the film into “Promising Young Woman” territory. Had this part of the film been more spelled out, it might have resulted in a stronger film.
Despite the vagueness of its structure, “Double Walker” draws us into our world, and that’s what every movie about the afterlife and ghosts needs to do to be memorable. And one of the things that stands out about Mix as a writer and producer is that, she hasn’t created a showy showcase for herself. This is about giving herself a platform for ideas that isn’t preachy, creating an original landscape for the story, and writing herself a character to speak to those ideas. That it succeeds as much as it does is a credit to the chances she takes.
