Jérémie Renier and Marine Vacth in Double Lover (Cohen Media Group)

The impeccable cinematography in François Ozon’s new mind game belongs in 2018, but its soul harks back to the psycho-gonzo oeuvre of Hitchcock, Bergman, and Gaslight. Oh, and don’t forget David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers. This tale of a young woman romantically embroiled with a pair of psychotherapist twins takes endless hallucinatory turns, wandering into the retro swamps of mumbo-jumbo with airy, high-end style.

A former model, Chloé (Marine Vacth, resembling a moodier Scarlett Johansson), arrives at therapist Paul Meyer’s office with distressing but manageable complaints: a desire for attention, pangs from an absent mother, and stomach pains. Her blond, avuncular doctor (Jérémie Renier) listens affably, but soon he begs off their treatment; he declares he has fallen for the young woman. Chloé hurls herself impulsively into his arms at the confession, and soon the two are moving in together.

Rootling through Paul’s documents while he’s at work, Chloé comes across his passport and discovers Paul has mysteriously changed his name. When confronted, Paul avoids her questions, but a random bus ride leads Chloé to a sighting of Paul kissing a woman outside an apartment building. When she sleuths out the location, she stumbles across a bad-boy version of her husband: a golden-haired psychotherapist, only minus the milquetoast bangs and eyeglasses, bristling with arrogance. This is Louis Delord (also played by Renier), Paul’s hidden twin as it turns out, and Chloé begins therapy in his swank offices under an assumed name. “Lying to seduce—it’s not uncommon for pretty women,” he taunts her at her first session, knowing she has concealed her identity. He then goes on to charge his new patient top euro for her treatment and to have brutal, sadistic sex.

Sound fou yet?  We’re just getting started. Time to enter a funhouse where Chloé fantasizes about being ravaged by the two blonds, her doppelganger emerges, and something alive and very disagreeable turns up in an engagement ring box. There’s even a mutant twin calico cat (in addition to Jacqueline Bisset playing two parts) to reinforce the doubles theme. By the time Chloé shakily points a gun at multiple reflections of the twins chanting, “C’est moi, Chloé!” “C’est moi, Chloé!,” you will have given up trying to make sense of the Freudian/Polanskian pastiche.

That’s all right, because with weirdness this elegant you don’t mind throwing in the serviette. Manu Dacosse’s cinematography veers from elegant minimalism to gold-drenched richness, always playing artfully off architecture and décor. The camerawork leaps into high camp, with glancing mirror shots and two bogglingly odd sequences that transform a throbbing vagina into metaphors for something else. The artiness of the spectacle diminishes the impact of the film’s sexual politics, which can feel distasteful, particularly in the post-Weinstein era. Still, dressing up a woozy vision as something chic, Double Lover lingers in the mind, just not in its more rational regions.