Whenever I've watched 24 Hour Psycho, Douglas Gordon's slowed-down 1993 video presentation of Hitchcock's thriller, I somehow manage to miss the shower scene. I always arrive too early or too late, and have never had the patience to see it through. This time I failed to catch the ominous shadow at the shower curtain yet again, in Edinburgh's Royal Scottish Academy Building, where 24 Hour Psycho is installed in a major survey of Gordon's work.  The show is uncanny, disturbing and at times rather beautiful. It follows Gordon's retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art earlier this year, as well as the international success of the film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, directed by Gordon and the French-Algerian artist Philippe Parreno.  Many of the works here will be familiar to those who have followed Gordon's development since the early 1990s, and especially to those who saw his 2002 Hayward Gallery exhibition. But this is a tighter, more judicious and, in my view, better installed and edited ensemble.  The large galleries at the Royal Scottish Academy are ideally suited to Gordon's video installations. Here is Through a Looking Glass, his 1999 take on Scorsese's Taxi Driver, which loops the scene in which Travis Bickle plays with his new gun, relishing a confrontation. "You make the move. It's your move," says Bickle to an empty room. "Don't try it, you fuck. You talkin' to me? ... Then who the hell else are you talking to? I don't see nobody else here."  Gordon replays the scene on two screens, the young Robert De Niro in a face-off with the young Robert De Niro, the two projections running out of synch so that Bickle's monologue becomes a real dialogue, albeit with himself. (In fact, it was hard not to think he was talking to me.)  Gordon's Feature Film, from the same year, follows James Conlon in close-up as he conducts a full concert orchestra, playing Bernard Herrmann's score for Hitchcock's Vertigo. Conlon's head and arms fill the screen, his hands a flurry. He is filmed in real time, or rather movie time: when there is no music on Vertigo's soundtrack, the orchestra is silent, the screen blank.  Originally projected on a single, double-sided screen, the film has Conlon, like Bickle, facing himself. When I first saw Feature Film I wondered if Conlon was, like Kim Novak in Vertigo, a double. Watching the camera's fixation on Conlon now, Feature Film comes over as a precursor to Zidane, with its periods of silence, the bursts of noise and energy, the sense one has of watching a detail from a much larger and largely unseen event - here the conductor's relationship with the orchestra and the unseen Hitchcock movie; in Zidane, the footballer's with Real Madrid and the match itself.  For those who need a crash course in Gordon's film and video work, the artist provides an update in the self-explanatory Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work From About 1992 Until Now. To Be Seen on Monitors, Some with Headphones, Others Run Silently, And All Simultaneously, 1992-in progress. Phew. For this work, two casually stacked arrangements of monitors are piled on the floor. The highs and lows are all there, as an array of fragments: a fly on its back, twitching and dying; the artist sticky-taping his face into a weird grimace, as though he were preparing for a session of cosmetic self-surgery; his hand, beckoning or giving us the finger; Captain Kirk molesting a female crew member of the Enterprise; Jekyll and Hyde.  Looking at all this material, it is not always easy to see what is Gordon's own work and what has been appropriated from movies and archive footage. Sometimes the act of identification, isolation and restaging of the footage is enough. On one screen is a single eye. It has a look of anxiety. About what? About being an elephant, I suppose, in a world of men. The elephant blinks its bright, intelligent brown eye and shifts its gaze.  This work, Play Dead: Real Time, has never been shown in the UK before. It incorporates another two perpendicular screens nearby, where the elephant is shown at a sharp angle to itself in the centre of the gallery. On the screens the animal paces about, not in a darkened space like this, but in a brightly lit, clean white room with shiny white floors - less like a gallery than a dance school. An elephant, then, in a ballet class.  The animal gets down on his knees and rolls on to his side, trunk extended like a dead man's arm - playing dead. The camera circles. If you follow it, walking between the screens, you begin to get the measure of this circus elephant, doing his party trick.  You can't ignore the elephant in the gallery, and I can't help wondering if Play Dead is a metaphor for artistic production: the elephant as this spectacular and unknowable thing, occupying a territory quite unnatural to it. Or perhaps the work is meant to be taken as a parable of death and resurrection, played out again and again in an endless cycle. Mirroring and reversal, repetition and inversion, doubling and duality have played a large part in many of Gordon's works: there are mirrors and doubled projections, words on the gallery wall and tattooed on the artist's body.  One less-than-successful installation has the trunk and roots of an apple tree grounded on a cracked mirror, while on the wall is a copy of Lucas Cranach the Elder's 1530s The Old and New Testaments, or Allegory of the Law and the Gospel. Without extensive and somewhat tedious commentary to footnote the installation, it is pretty inert, and serves only as a reminder that there's nothing like an elephant to stop you in your tracks.  On the other hand, the black-painted room hung from dado to ceiling with framed portraits - of film stars whose eyes have been snipped out, mounted on black or mirrored backgrounds; of actors whose faces appear to have been burned away by fire or acid; of Gordon, transfixed with himself in the mirror, and in convincing drag - works very well, as a narcissist's chamber, a stalker's lair, a temple to futile and dangerous obsession. There are several ordinary mirrors in which we, the spectators, can preen and inspect ourselves, too (and, come to that, spy on one another).  The exhibition continues across Edinburgh, in three sites in the Royal Botanic Gardens. In the beautiful and otherwise empty plain white rooms, corridors and stairwells of Inverleith House, Gordon has applied, spray-painted and drawn dozens of texts on the walls, the windowpanes, the shutter casings and doors. Some appear to be rambling apologetic messages delivered to a lover's answering machine; others are threats, injunctions, dates or just stray, occasionally deluded thoughts. Gordon has turned the entire building into a house of shouts and whispers. One could walk around here all day, going madder and madder, with the voices on the walls and the voices in one's head. The effect is both magical and sinister.  In the old wash house next door, Gordon has lit a small fire that will burn throughout the show, as a sort of Plato's Cave, where we can inspect our own shadows. And in Caledonian Hall, across the gardens, he has installed his creepy double-projection Between Darkness and Light (After William Blake). On one side of the translucent screen, Gordon projects Henry King's 1943 film The Song of Bernadette, about St Bernadette, whose visions of the Virgin at Lourdes led to her sanctification and the founding of the pilgrimage site. On the other side of the screen runs William Friedkin's 1973 horror movie, The Exorcist.  The images and sound from both movies interpenetrate one another. This is alarming. The inadvertent synchronicities between the films - one about virtue and goodness (shot in black and white), the other about unadulterated evil (shot in seamy, grubby colour) - are concerned with faith and doubt. Each film haunts the other. The whole thing haunts me.  · Douglas Gordon Superhumanatural is at various venues around Edinburgh until January 14. Details: 0870 118 1859 or www.nationalgalleries.org/douglasgordon
Douglas Gordon's eyeless portraits and De Niro doubles haunt his retrospective. But it's one performer's nifty trunk-and-foot-work that steals the show. By Adrian Searle