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Good movie but grossly overrated

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

The director, Isabel Coixet, has lent the images a peculiar texture. Half the film seems to involve panes of glass, the shiny walls of elevators, or mirrors of one sort or another. If possible they're fogged up or their transparency is lessened by patches of raindrops. Like the heroine, Sophie Turner, you're sometimes not sure of what you're seeing. But, thank God, no directorial razzle dazzle. The camera moves only when it should and there are few whiz-bangs on the sound track.Turner is a teen-ager in a British school. Her taciturn father is bound to a wheelchair. Her mother, she discovers, is having an affair with one of the school's teachers.The central theme is that Turner feels a Doppelgänger is following her about, sometimes taking her place at home or elsewhere. You have to love the idea of the double, someone who looks enough like you to confuse others. It goes back to Edgar Allan Poe and comes down to us through various channels. Any theme that is so popular can't be all bad.I once had a call from someone with exactly my name who lived near me in Philadelphia, complaining that he was getting midnight phone calls from my friends and asking me to tell them to stop it. I felt compelled to ask the guy out for dinner and he was my age, resembled me in his somatotype, and, indeed, was "Robert John Maxwell, Ph.D.," just as the midnight callers had asked, only he was a chemist not an anthropologist. I couldn't take my eyes off the guy at the restaurant. If he lifted a forkful of food, I followed it. Eerie, I'll tell you.Well -- I see I went slightly off the track there, but if I had a Doppelgänger like Poe's "William Wilson," he'd have reined me in pronto.The treatment of the story seems kind of sluggish at times. And I don't think it's all that well written. Sometimes it seemed as if the writers didn't know exactly where they wanted the story to go. Yes, Sophie Turner could be imagining things. As a counselor tells her, she has a crippled father, and "sometimes a trauma induces another trauma," whatever that means. But then again, others see this double too at times. So Turner can't be imagining her experiences. Then her mother tells her that she'd had an identical twin who died and was buried. Where the hell did that come, and why? We find out at the end, but the end makes no sense. It's as if the writers had thrown up their hands and simply given up.That's too bad because, as I say, it's a juicy and fruitful theme. Alfred Hitchcock did a marvelous job with it on one of this television programs, "The Case of Mister Pelham." There was no more logic to it than in this film but the ending was satisfying because it was a reasonable culmination of everything that had happened before. Sadly, that sense of completion is missing here.

The relationship of the teenager Fay Delussey (Sophie Turner) with her family is deeply affected when her beloved father Don (Rhys Ifans) has multiple sclerosis and her mother Ann (Claire Forlani) starts a love affair. Her teacher John (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) invites Fay to perform the important role of Lady Macbeth in a school play and her schoolmate Monica Meldrum (Charlotte Vega) is jealous of her with the choice. Soon strange events happen to Fay and she believes that Monica is the responsible for the acts. But her father discloses a family secret about his ghost daughter. "Another Me" is a slow-paced, boring and predictable ghost story. This is not the usual genre of the great director Isabel Coixet from "My Life Without Me", "The Secret Life of Words" and "Elegy". Despite the great cast, director and cinematography, the flawed plot does not help the performances. Why Fay's doppelganger decides to haunt her after so many years? How her father could know that Fay should not look at her face? Why Fay insisted to meet her doppelganger after her father's advice? The conclusion is totally predictable. My vote is five.Title (Brazil): "Meu Outro Eu" ("My other Me")

Another Me is quite a competent film with an interesting screenplay, good atmosphere and solid performances. What I liked the most from this film is the ambiguity displayed by the screenplay during the first half, when we are not sure whether something supernatural is happening, or if it's just the main character's nerves and concern for her father's situation, besides of being stressed due to the rehearsals of a play. The film brings us clues which make any alternative possible: from the supernatural point of view, there are mysterious shadows with nothing projecting them; and from the mundane point of view, there is a rival student with long red hair, like the main character, something which reinforces the theory of a joke. The screenplay keeps being interesting during the second half, but it includes some unnecessary moments, such as the main character's romance with a gallant and the domestic tension provoked by her father's declining condition. However, the film recovers from those small missteps during the ending, adding suspense, growing suspicions and surprising revelations which enrich the mystery of the ghost double. Another Me adopts some tricks and concepts from the horror genre, but I would define it as a psychological thriller with a well achieved atmosphere, competent performances (highlighting Rhys Ifans', offering a weird serious work, very different to the lunatics he usually plays) and some subtle surprises which separate this film from other juvenile thrillers, revealing a more mature and artistic sensibility, which is exactly what we can expect considering director and screenwriter Isabel Coixet's previous work. In conclusion, I wouldn't consider it a great movie, but I liked Another Me pretty much, and I can recommend it. There are better films about "doppelgangers" (such as Enemy); and better tales about teenage neurosis out of control (such as Ginger Snaps). But none of them offers Shakespearean interludes which employ Macbeth as a mirror of the juvenile drama; that's where we can notice Coixet's ambition to transcend genres and tell universal stories based on the human experience.

OK, it's not the greatest movie in the world, but its far from the worst and it's not the dull, lame movie some reviewers would have you think. I found it to be an above average flick with a surprise ending.Plot In A Paragraph: Fey (Sophie Turner) finds her perfect life is turned upside down when he Dad is diagnosed as fatally ill, worse is to follow when she starts being stalked by a mysterious doppelganger who has her eyes set on assuming her identity.This was the first time I've seen Turner in anything aside from Game Of Thrones and she does a good job as she pretty much carries this movie on her own, despite the cast including Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Rhys Ifans. Meyers isn't given as much to do as one would hope, and Ifans does what Ifans does, Geraldine Chaplin does well in her small role as an elderly neighbour.