Crew
Director/Story – Dennis Iliadis, Screenplay – Bill Gullo, Producers – Dennis Iliadis & Tim Perell, Photography – Mihai Malaimare Jr., Music – Nathan Larson, Visual Effects Supervisor – Craig Lynn, Visual Effects – [Hy*drau*lx] (Supervisor – Colin Strause) & Lola | VFX (Supervisor – Edson Williams), Special Effects Supervisor – David Fletcher, Production Design – Roshelle Berliner. Production Company – Process Productions/Lola Visual Effects/Hydraulx Entertainment.
Cast
Rhys Wakefield (David), Logan Miller (Teddy), Ashley Hinshaw (Jill), Natalie Hall (Melanie Tremblay), Maria Malcolm (Heather), Rohan Kymal (Angad), Adam David Thompson (Kyle), Ron Ogden (Mike), Peter Zimmerman (Steve), Bernard Jones (Greg), April Billingsley (Brenda), Josh Warren (Stan), Joey Nappo (Keith), Megan Hayes (Bonnie), Chrissy Chambers (Kitty), Ronke Shonibare (Katty)
Plot
David makes a surprise visit to his girlfriend Jill at college during a fencing tournament. However, he makes a huge mistake when he comes up behind another girl thinking she is Jill and kisses her only for Jill to walk in on them. With Jill returned home for the holidays, David sees the opportunity to apologise and clear things up with her. He and his best friend Teddy attend a house party put on by Angad. However, a meteorite has come down nearby and energy emerges from it and passes through the power lines in the area. As the energy affects the party, David and Teddy make the discovery that it has created doppelgangers of all the partygoers.
Plus One, spelled as +1 on some of the publicity but not on the film’s credits, was the fourth film for director Dennis Iliadis. Iliadis first appeared with the non-genre comedy Hardcore (2004) and then the remake of The Last House on the Left (2009). Subsequent to this, he went onto the Blumhouse production Delirium (2018), He’s Out There (2018), which was made under a pseudonym, and Buzzheart (2024).
There has been a reasonable body of doppelganger films – see the likes of The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970), The Dark Half (1993), Doppelganger (1993), The Brøken (2008), Cam (2018) and Us (2019) – usually with a plot in which a malevolent double or doubles invade and take over the placid life of the protagonist(s). Indeed, Plus One came out in a year period that produced a small trend of these films with Denis Villeneuve’s high-profile Enemy (2013), along with the likes of Another Me (2013), The Double (2013) and The One I Love (2014). For a more detailed listing see Doppelganger Films.
Plus One is also a Body Snatchers film of sorts. This was a genre that emerged in the 1950s with classics such as It Came from Outer Space (1953), Invaders from Mars (1953), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), featuring alien invaders infiltrating society, controlling minds or replacing humans with cold, emotionless duplicates. Most of the originals have undergone remakes and there have been a great many variants since such as The Stepford Wives (1975) where people are replaced by androids.
Most body snatchers films are doppelganger films by another name. Plus One offers a nominal science-fictional explanation for proceedings where the doppelgangers are created by a meteorite coming down and releasing an alien energy into the telephone lines. There is no more detailed an explanation than that – the whole film could easily be a fantasy film without the need for any meteorite. One of the oddities of the film that is left unexplained is that it also seems to be taking place in some kind of timeloop where the events are being enacted over and over as the original keeps seeing their other selves go through actions and lines of dialogue that they said earlier.
Plus One takes the novel approach of giving us a doppelganger/body snatchers film that takes place with teenage protagonists. The most unique twist on this is that the entire alien invasion and appearance of the doppelgangers all takes place at a house party. Iliadis and co go all out and determine to create the ultimate teen house party with the home being a palatial multi-storey dwelling with grounds sufficient for a rave to be held, including a stage featuring two dancers in Day Glo costumes.
As it started to open, I dismissed Plus One as another teen horror. However, it proves to be quite a bit more interesting than that from the central characters’ attempts to work out what is going on to Rhys Wakefield’s obsession with his ex Ashley Hinshaw – at one point he seeks the doppelganger out in preference to the original because she accepts him back whereas the original rejects his efforts to reunite with her. The film climaxes on an all-out war between the doubles and originals. It is only the vagueness of explanations about what is going in that weakens the film.
Trailer here