Yukio is a stuck up doctor from a wealthy background who marries apparent amnesiac, Rin. Their married life with his very proper parents is passionless and formal. Yukio's father dies and his mother seems to become unhinged and speaks against Rin. One night the mother is startled by a man from the slums and she dies of a heart attack. The police are called and look through the house to find no one. After a row with Rin about favouring his rich clients over slum dwellers, Yukio walks in the garden of his house and is assaulted by a man he is terrified to recognise as his double. His double, Sutekichi, throws him down a dry well and takes over his life.

Initially Rin welcomes the new passionate husband but we discover that she recognises the new man for who he is. It transpires that Rin is one of the slum dwellers that Yukio despises and that the new man was her robbing partner. Stuck in his well, Sutekichi tortures Yukio with the truth as Yukio starts to take on the desperate aspect of the people he despises. When Yukio is given a knife to end his suffering Sutekichi expects that his twin will have done the decent thing for the sins of his parents. But will Yukio have learnt more from his double and become a better man?

Gemini touches on many of Shinya Tsukamoto's themes. The duality of man as both civilised and natural, the absorption of environment into man and the poetry of movement. The tale touches on many fabular devices - doppelgänger, the road not taken, and the baby borne down the stream a la Moses. Interestingly this is a period piece set not in Tsukamaoto's scary modern technological nightmare but in Meiji-era Japan. This doesn't stop Tsukamoto's usually creative character and set designs and the slum dwellers are evidence of this. Sutekichi and the cameoing Tadanobu Asano are dramatic looking ragamuffins with ragged flamboyant clothing and coloured hair. Even the hair designs of the wealthier doctor's family and servants emphasises repression. In terms of pure mise en scene Gemini is a masterpiece being both period and out of time.

The story itself is not a simple reversal but a tale of a man becoming a beast, Yukio, and a beast becoming a man, Sutekichi. That this character exchange occurs through the device of being thrown down a well is wonderfully Freudian. The new Yukio becomes the lover Rin actually wants with his passion and new feeling for the poor and the embourgeoised Sutekichi becomes complacent, cold and unloved. Yukio becomes a man to be respected and not an arrogant dandy when he is abused by a beggar at his gate he can simply turn and scare the man by staring at him when previously he walked on scared to confront him.

Gemini displays terrific technique with the mixture of image and music and fine editing. In one short scene Rin waits to seduce Yukio by the river and the choppy editing displays the artificiality of her wait. The story is told elliptically and the editing reveals secret by secret so the viewer is never wholly sure who to favour - at first the ragamuffin avenging himself against the callous doctor, and then the tortured man beating his torturer. Tsukamoto clearly sees Yukio's trials as a lesson and an exercise in humility but the end is one where the bourgeois Yukio has come to terms with his social responsibility and honest in his passions.

Gemini is brilliant, thought provoking cinema which tries to change the viewer much as it does Yukio.