The Double is the second feature film from Richard Ayoade (star of
The IT Crowd, director of
Submarine)
and it is a remarkably assured sophomore work; set in an otherworldly
dystopia of sinister lighting and retro-décor the film tracks an
alienated young man’s descent into destructive paranoia. It is a
memorably peculiar, surreal and haunting thriller, with an undercurrent
of dark comedy and an unnerving mood that immediately impacts. Ayoade
and co-writer Avi Korine (brother of Harmony Korine,
Spring Breakers) have used Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1846 novella
of the same name
as a source and inspiration.
Much of
The Double takes place in a drab, dingy Orwellian
bureaucratic office where overworked and underpaid clerks like Simon
James (Jesse Eisenberg) check in and out and are pigeonholed into stuffy
portals. Their work is tedious and repetitious. Despite his thankless
loyalty to the firm for seven years Simon has remained just as
insignificant as the day he started. His I.D card never registers and he
has to prove his identity on a daily basis to the building security
guard and his supervisor Mr Papadopoulos (‘Mr Inconceivable’ himself,
Wallace Shawn) believes his name is Stanley. He is also hardly noticed
by Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), a colleague he is smitten with. She lives in
the apartment opposite him and his evenings involve telescopically
spying on her in a disconcertingly predatory fashion. He is too nebbish
and shy to approach her, creating obvious and poorly executed excuses to
visit her in the copy room.
For the shrinking Simon, nothing fits. He is frequently nervous and
sweaty; his oversized suit always crumpled. The inexplicable increases
in the rates for his mother’s nursing care are lifted unchallenged from
his wallet. The opening scene reveals that he doesn’t even have
authority over a seat on an empty train. His pitiful existence and
tenuous sanity begins to further unravel with the existential crises
brought on by the arrival of the firm’s newest employee, James Simon –
his exact doppelganger. While no one else claims to recognize the
resemblance, it is not the replications but the differences between the
pair that most trouble Simon. The confident, assertive and immediately
popular James doesn’t just possess some of the qualities desired by
Simon, but a crassness and arrogance that are unbecoming but we sense
lurk within his damaged psyche. Though the two briefly become friends,
it is when James successfully makes a pass at Hannah when Simon goes
further off the rails.
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