The Double

Richard Ayoade deftly crafts humanist comedy from dark, Kafkaesque absurdity in his Dostoyevsky adaptation The Double. Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg) is trapped in an uncanny, Orwellian nightmare, living in a lonely tower block and stuck in perpetual night. He works for a sinister company with the obscure objective to turn people into data “as there is no such thing as a special person”. Simon knows this more than most – not only is he not special, he’s a forgettable non-person, so much so that when his literal and figurative doppelganger James Simon (also Eisenberg) shows up to win over his office and his girl, not even his friends notice that he is an exact simulacrum of Simon. 

Eisenberg’s dual performance crackles as the hapless romantic Simon and the misogynistic, manipulative James. Mia Wasikowska is Hannah, Simon’s unrequited love and a manic pixie dream girl with a voice. Ayoade’s film is wonderful artifice, perfectly constructing a claustrophobic microcosm of aural and spatial unheimlich; an intensely hostile world, as terrifying as it is funny. [Rachel Bowles]