The Baker

Seems like everyone is meeting their alternate reality doppelgangers these days. The Flash, Michelle Yeoh, even Spider-Man’s alternate reality version is meeting alternate reality versions of himself. Now not even good honest bakers are safe – as Taylan Yalkin’s The Baker demonstrates.

The short follows the eponymous bread maker (Anil Kaygili) as he hears a strange noise from his kitchen. As he investigates, he is met by a man his exact double. As he tries to figure out whether this individual is a friend or foe, he promptly vanishes – but the Baker continues his search. When the double re-emerges, he is armed – but there may still be time for the pair to find common ground.

The Baker is a brief, stylish but somewhat lightweight short about hostility and fear of the unknown. Anil Kaygili’s protagonist encounters his exact duplicate and reacts with fear and apprehension rather than understanding or openness. Filmed entirely dialogue-free, the film still manages to intrigue through Kaygili’s performance – which communicates the baker’s troubled state impressively. The cliffhanger conclusion underlines the film’s ultimate message – however it is ultimately not one with an awful lot of meat on the bone – or one that has not been explored in other films.

The horror stylings are slick and a sense of serious tension and unease is created and enforced well by Taylan Yalkin. The lighting is a highlight throughout, turning a simple kitchen into a dark and threatening house of horrors in which the baker becomes trapped. The one-shot sequences of the Baker searching for his doppelganger imbue a sense of chaos and frantic panic to the viewer – placing us directly into the Baker’s environment and creating a sensation that the supposedly threatening adversary could be in our own vicinity. The use of zoom shots helps land the key final scene – and helps in offsetting the viewer and making clear this otherworldly, unnatural event is making the baker question his own grounding.

The Baker is fine for what it is – a short taste of horror providing a well-produced chase sequence with a touch of reality-bending surrealism. But a deeper and greater theme or message is lacking at its centre. It’s unlikely to leave a grand impression of its audience, who would expect a bit more originality, intensity and philosophy from such a film.