Movie Doubles with K. Austin Collins and Mayukh Sen

This week, we sat down with critics K. Austin Collins and Mayukh Sen—to talk about one of the most enduring motifs in movie history: the double. We delved into a hand-picked selection of mirroring movies, including Brian de Palma’s underrated Femme Fatale, Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan, Carlos Saura’s Peppermint Frappé, and Bimal Roy’s Madhumati, a film released the same year as—and with some eerie similarities to—that urtext of double features, Hitchcock’s Vertigo. As we discovered, doubles, mirrors, and dubious impersonators can be found in nearly every era and genre of cinema, with the trope generating an apparently endless variety of themes, narrative forms, and interpretations.