Double Edged: The Price of Survival is a Sword Over One’s Head

Tony Rakshith’s Double Edged is a psychological thriller about a man whose attempt at suicide is interrupted by a call from an impossible caller. Sucked into the matrix spun by this caller, the protagonist Alex finds himself trapped very much between a rock and a hard place.  

Confined largely to Alex’s (James Tolley) bedroom, this is a plot about limitations. Isolated from the world, Alex finds that he has no course left but to die (the reasons are only obliquely explained and clearly secondary to their effects). The barebones room, the curtains drawn in the middle of the day to cut off the demands of sunlight to be active, the sickly artificial lighting all evince a man who has no will to live, much less expose himself to the vagaries of the world. The camera maintains a close to medium distance for most of the film, a claustrophobic attention to detail to represent the minutely agonising experience of trying to function despite the weight of living.

The cache of some intense emotion that he carries within himself tortures him so much that not wanting to live shows itself to be the natural consequence of this torment. Until a call comes on his bedside landline, an interruption, another limitation, a voice (Anthony Aldapa) that Alex at first does not recognise and then cannot believe to be real. Days become stranger yet and Alex is barraged by questions that he never wants to answer. 

The film lifts its premise from a number of sources, among them an Indian film from 2010. It is a lineage worth following for the psychological workings it reveals of men at odds with their own selves, their lives. Here, it is presented in an intensified form with Alex possibly carrying the trauma of combat.   

Double Edged makes a thriller of survivor’s guilt: the gratitude of making it out alive is overwhelmed into near oblivion by the guilt of being the only one to have done it. To compound it, there is the perpetual matter of keeping on living.