Twin Piques

TITLE: RAISING CAIN

WRITER AND DIRECTOR: BRIAN DE PALMA

TITLE: SINGLE WHITE FEMALE

DIRECTOR: BARBET SCHROEDER

WRITER: DON ROOS

THE BOTTOM LINE: Two thrillers from clever directors. One outsmarts the audience; the other outsmarts itself.

We are all our own twins. We wage fratricidal war — ego vs. id, propriety vs. instinct, the will to do good vs. the itch to raise hell — on the battlefield of our split souls. What is civilization if not the successful repression of the evil twin in all of us? And what is cinema if not an artful evocation of that same malevolent impulse? Seeing a thriller, we are schizo sibs: the part of us that is scared and the part that knows it’s only a movie.

The problem shared by Single White Female and Raising Cain, two new evil- twin horror movies, is that the characters in them apparently haven’t seen any movies. Just by having caught Fatal Attraction, Allie Jones (Bridget Fonda) in Single White Female could have avoided a lot of the grief she suffers at the hands of her roommate-from-hell Hedy (Jennifer Jason Leigh). If Hedy’s possessive rages hadn’t given Allie a hint, the dead pet would have. And in Raising Cain, none of the cops has seen Psycho. Otherwise they might have been suspicious of that tall creature in a cheap shoulder-length wig sneaking out of the motel, while all homicide was breaking loose.

We know there’s nothing new under the sun or in the dark. But sometimes the most sophisticated moviemakers forget how familiar audiences are with old movie plots. Fonda and Leigh, two gifted, diligent actresses, work hard to find subtleties in their characters: the sweet thing who must locate her angry strength and the sick thing who has been trying to duplicate herself in other women’s images ever since her twin sister died. Director Barbet Schroeder (Reversal of Fortune) sweats too, swathing the mayhem in dusky tones, shifting moods easily from working-girl realism to nightmare melodrama. Yet the piece moves so deliberately that the viewer is able to anticipate the next atrocity, rather than getting thrilled by it.

Viewers’ familiarity with the gore genre has never bothered Brian De Palma. He has been considered a Hitchcock groupie for so long that, by now, the slur seems like a badge. The plot of Raising Cain — about a child psychologist (John Lithgow) still under the spell of his mad-scientist father and an evil twin named Cain — swipes from Psycho and Michael Powell’s sicko classic Peeping Tom. What’s fun here is that De Palma has rung cunning changes on Hitchcockian twists. What if the car that Norman Bates watched sink into the swamp had a woman inside, clawing to save her life? What if abnormal Norman were to be questioned by the shrink who has decoded his warped family life? And what if Norman were to escape from custody to reveal an even creepier secret?

Movies can convince us of the impossible; they have trouble with what Hitchcock called “the implausibles.” Both Single White Female and Raising Cain too often beg the question “Why would such a smart person do such a stupid thing?” Single White Female gets its best thrills early on, when Hedy is falling in love with Allie — and filling the void inside both of them. Sisterhood never looked so vulnerable. “You haven’t been yourself,” Allie says to Hedy. “I know,” her would-be twin replies. “I’ve been you.”

And De Palma, in career rehab from the Bonfire of the Vanities debacle, seems liberated from plausibility. Instead he proposes a labyrinth of alternate realities, replaying a scene from different points of view, teasing the audience to guess which one is the movie truth. Raising Cain makes Hitchcock’s favorite demurral — “It’s only a movie, Ingrid” — sound like a declaration of faith. For De Palma, who is happy to declare himself Hitchcock’s evil twin, “only a movie” is all that Hollywood allows.