Wherever you go, there you are – or, at least, something that looks like you. That’s the terror at the heart of doppelganger horror The Fetch, which premiered Sunday at the Austin Film Festival.
The summoning of the supernatural creature known as the Fetch really began in 2016 when writer/director J.C. Doler and his wife, Taylor Bracewell, made a short film called “Hangman” for a competition. “We put it together in two weeks,” Doler said, “and then we received an email from an interested producer saying, ‘Hey, is there a feature in this?’ ‘Well, there is now!’” So Doler quickly turned around what he called “the worst script you ever read,” and then spent the next six years finding the feature version of story across 28 drafts.
There were production hiccups along the way – finding and losing funding, and then getting through the pandemic – but the biggest issue from a writing perspective was working out who his monster was. In that 15-minute original, a man is pushed to suicide by his own doppelganger: However, the nature of the doppelganger is never really explained. Knowing he needed to build more mythology for the feature, Doler started looking up synonyms for and similar myths to the doppelganger and came across the obscure Irish legend of the Fetch. However, while it’s mentioned in several histories of folklore, he could only find one actual story. “It’s about a woman who sees her husband’s doppelganger and knows he’s going to die, so we just took that and expanded it to fit our purposes.”
In The Fetch, the monster is non-corporeal, a force that latches itself to those in grief to turn their own emotions against them, and finally push them to their doom. Here it’s Nicholas (Logan Donavan, Masters of Sex), a happily married father whose world is shattered when his young son dies in a tragic accident. The Fetch soon latches itself to him – but that’s just what he sees. His wife, Charlie (Aleksa Palladino, The Midnight Swim, Halt and Catch Fire, Boardwalk Empire) and shrink (Robert Longstreet, The Catechism Cataclysm, Mohawk) think it’s just him seeing his suicidal feelings in physical form. </p
However, it’s not just Nicholas’ grief, but also that of Charlie. “She’s on her own thing, but we’re just not with her as much,” said Palladino. While Nicholas deals with his guilt, she finds herself totally isolated. “There are these moments where even the people we’re closest with, a situation can bring us to a place where we wake up as strangers again. … There’s this scene where [Nicholas] says, ‘I thought we were in this together,’ and she says, ‘So did I,’ and you have to remember, he just tried to check out of the whole thing and leave her with double the grief … That’s such a betrayal that we never talk about in the film but it’s so felt.”
For Donavan, whether the Fetch is real or merely springs from Nicholas’ imagination, it’s a manifestation of his survivor’s guilt. “We connect it to the grief element, this grief that needs to be expressed but it’s being suppressed, and how that transforms into a monster, into this version of the Fetch.” The film becomes Nicholas’ internal battle: “The doppelganger is himself, and it’s the inner experience manifest outwardly. … It’s death feeling like it was cheated. ‘You were supposed to die, and I’m coming to get what I deserve.’”
Real or not, it meant Donavan had to regularly spend 80 minutes in the makeup chair to become the Fetch version of Nicholas. The actor praised makeup artist Lisa O’Neal for not only coming up with an effective creature design, but also one that could contend with the brutal schedule and shot lists of an indie film shoot. “There were a couple of days where it was Nicholas-Fetch-Nicholas-Fetch-Nicholas,” Donavan said. “It was back to back to back.”
Obviously, some scenes required a body double, and so in some scenes the Fetch is played by Alexander Dafnis – who is much bigger and heavier than Donavan. Luckily, Doler laughed, “It really worked for the beard.”
The Fetch
D: J.C. Doler
USA, 103 min., World Premiere
Wed., Oct. 30, 5:45pm, Galaxy Highland
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This article appears in October 25 • 2024.
