The Double

While Richard Ayoade continues his interest in the marginalised – Submarine’s oddball teenage outsider is replaced by The Double’s alienated drone – The Double is a film that boasts a growing maturity (and darkness) in his work.

Simon (Eisenberg) is a meek, low-level employee at a dreary firm. He hates his work, his dingy apartment, and, yes, himself. His I.D scanner never works. The security guard never recognises him. His boss (Wallace Shawn) ignores his attempts to increase efficiency. It would be all too much for him if not for workmate Hannah (Wasikowska), whom he watches do her kooky thing through his telescope. Then Simon’s doppelganger James (also Eisenberg) is employed at the firm; confident, dynamic and sneaky, when James makes moves on Hannah it stirs Simon into action at last…

An adaptation of Dostoefvsky’s novella, The Double has more a Charlie Kaufman vibe – quirky, yes, but there’s a gloomy darkness that Kaufman shies away from and that Ayoade tackles head on.

The look of the film stands out. This is a retro-futuristic industrial world of shadows and harsh spotlights, of dull buildings, swamp green wallpaper, and Victorian fog. The lifts don’t work. Suits (grey) are a size too big. Apartments look like refurbished basements in which they didn’t bother hiding the overhead pipes. A passing train rumbles the chipped crockery. Everything is normal yet nothing is. It’s Barton Fink’s Hotel Earle set in Gilliam’s Brazil. Dank gloom. Ayoade, like Gilliam, can be accused of being distracted by the world he’s created and it’s only when James (eventually) turns up that The Double becomes interested in the psychological aspects of the story. But once he does things get meatier, more challenging.

It’s not a happy film, despite the humour (and it can be funny), and an air of depression hangs over everything. There’s a disconnect, of being present yet absent; as Eisenberg confesses to Wasikowska in a shadowy corridor, he feels like someone can put their hands right through him as if he wasn’t there. Sometimes the sound effects are out of sync – we’re hearing something completely different to what we see.

It’s all designed to get into Eisenberg’s twitchy mind-set, to see how he views the world. And his head is a paranoid place to be. The Double is a film by someone who has experienced dark days. Eisenberg, by the way, has never been better.

More interesting than emotionally engaging, thought-provoking than enjoyable, The Double is one that will bounce around the brain for days after. It’s not often that happens anymore.