LIFF review: The Double

The Louisiana International Film Festival featured an advance screening of The Double, released in the U.K. last month but not yet available to mainstream audiences in the U.S. Here is 225’s review:

If Brazil and Eraserhead could mate—and I wouldn’t put it past gonzo directors Terry Gilliam and David Lynch to figure out how to arrange such a seduction—the resulting child would look an awful lot like The Double.

Ambitious and unapologetically unsettling, this dark, surreal comedy is the second directorial effort from English actor and writer Richard Ayoade, a talent who Anglophiles worship for his hilarious roles in The Mighty Boosh and The IT Crowd but who showed a powerful eye for storytelling and striking visuals in 2010 with his feature debut, the autumnal and Wes Anderson-esque teen dramedy Submarine.

Loosely adapted from the Fyodor Dostoevsky novella of the same name, The Double stars Jesse Eisenberg as a neurotic and mousy government clerk who toils away day after day—at what exactly is never explained, as is little in this dream-like tale. He’s the very definition of a drone. His love for a beautiful and equally tortured neighbor goes unspoken. He’s like a supporting character in his own out-of-control life. That is until suddenly a mysterious new co-worker arrives, a young man who looks and sounds exactly like himself. But physicality is where the similarities end. This doppelganger is confident, socially adept and an expert wooer of women.

So is this new colleague an external rival or an internal one? Eisenberg’s anxieties ratchet up to 11 when his love interest—played to glowing, classic Hollywood perfection by Mia Wasikowska—falls for his own charismatic double instead of himself. Is he going mad or finally finding the courage to be his own man?

Filling the picture with cold noir and industrial Eastern European overtones—and buzzing, humming ambient room tones pulled straight out of the Eraserhead playbook—Ayoade creates a mash-up of non sequitur scenes and mind-bending dialogs set in an intriguing world out of time and place, a world whose surface seems like a fun house gone wrong but whose moods and emotions cut to the quick. These dark atmospherics buttress Eisenberg’s sense of isolation and desperation—bold choices for a film that is often laugh out loud funny.

Ayoade’s genius is evident not only in the film’s memorable visuals, but in Eisenberg’s casting. The actor’s two greatest assets—awkward nervousness and dweeby douchery—are both on full display here and often face to face in the same scene.

That this is only Ayoade’s second film is startling. His confidence and command of the medium, his blend of so many influences into something fresh, is remarkable. With this film he has created an entertaining headscratcher with surprising emotional and intellectual depth. The Double is a must-see movie this year.