The Scapegoat is a British film adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's 1957 book of the same name, starring Matthew Rhys as lookalike characters John Standing and Johnny Spence.

The Scapegoat tells the provocative story of two very different men who have one thing in common – a face. Held up changing trains, John goes to a bar – whereupon he spots Johnny and feels a bolt of electricity. Johnny is his mirror image; the likeness is uncanny. But while John is in search of human connection, aristocratic landowner Johnny craves an escape from his responsibilities.

The two men spend the night in the same hotel. But when John awakens the next morning Johnny is nowhere to be found and his driver wants to take John “home.” Some deep impulse responds to the crack of opportunity and John literally steps into his double’s shoes.

The Scapegoat Movie Review

“More than 50 years after Robert Hamer, director of such classic British films as Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Long Memory (1952), directed a faithful adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s novel The Scapegoat, another well-regarded British director, Charles Sturridge (“Brideshead Revisited”), has given the story another go. Moving it from France to England and slightly tweaking the motivation of the central characters has yielded a less schematic, more psychologically true rendering of the identity-switch theme at the center of the tale…Welsh actor Matthew Rhys is unfamiliar to me, but he has a strong, but mutable physical bearing that can move easily from a sacked teacher to a lord of the manor, thus largely getting over one improbable hurdle this story poses. He adopts a different spine for John and Johnny, and is impressive in both, making me wonder if the film actually had identical twins in the two roles. As can normally be expected of a British cast, the performances are uniformly wonderful, though they fall just short of being the cohesive ensemble of other films. The look of the film is appropriately rarified and atmospheric, and fans of PBS’s Masterpiece dramas and such prestige films as The King’s Speech (2010) will lap The Scapegoat up, particularly as the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II forms an underlying rationale for John’s final decision to stay or go. The Scapegoat is a finely crafted, if somewhat superficial character study that is engrossing to the end.” ferdyonfilms.com