Dostoyevsky's novella, Ayoade's admitted source, provides a useful map. Fellow director (and fellow comedian), Terry Gilliam, has also gone ahead and left some bureaucratically dystopian footsteps to follow, if you're willing to put Orwell to your back and dig up that director's crazy electro-dreams.
Ayoade is certainly happy to, though his tonal and thematic nods to the ex-Python's magnum opus are more self-conscious acknowledgements than a step-by-step retread. The Double shares Brazil's number crunching, button pressing, paper pushing view of the future but its focus is far more insular. Where Gilliam let fly with neurotic fantasy, Ayoade burrows inward, pitting one man against his own self worth.
Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg) is an introverted analyst with serious identity issues. Actually, he has many issues but his concept of self is the one that disrupts his life most dramatically. When it comes to non-entities, Simon's your man; else he would be if you noticed he was there, which is unlikely. He's been working in the same depressing cubicle for seven years yet nobody seems to recognise him. Even the elevators don't register his presence. As he puts it, he sometimes feels like someone could reach out and pass a hand right through him.
The only thing that can pull Simon out of his internal cage is his supposed soul mate, Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), the copy girl at his office. In Simon's eyes, Hannah is his lonely, shy, self-conscious other half. He's taken an apartment opposite her just so he can be closer to her, and so he can dig through her trash, while he plucks up the courage to ask her out.
Simon's thwarted advances, a suicide and an unceremonious party ejection herald the arrival of James (Jesse Eisenberg), Simon's more confident, more respected, more popular doppelgänger. At first the two men make friends but it's not long before the situation turns decidedly psychotic.
Ayoade and his co-writer, Avi Korine, very knowingly work the nice guy/stalker dynamic, balancing the necessity of a relatable protagonist with the creepiness of his actions. Simon is an pathetic entity, whom they cleverly bat between the sympathetic and the dangerously obsessive. James gets a similar treatment, only he swaggers confidently between charming bravado and malevolent self-importance. Wasikowska brings a charmingly fierce energy to the triangle (?), effectively calling out the gulf between Simon's perception of her and her own personal identity and pricking his nice-guy-if-only-you'd-notice-me view of himself. That all this takes potentially takes place within Simon's own crumbling consciousness only adds to the already fraught distance between self-perception and reality.
After the digestible quirkiness of his debut feature, Submarine, Ayoade's work here is surprisingly edgy. Visually, aurally and psychologically he works the murky light and shadow to great effect. The calibre of the performances he's drawn from his actors also impresses, though much of the legwork has been done by his casting crew, with Eisenberg proving once again he has a knack for finding humanity in neurosis, and Wasikowska working her plain Jane charisma to best effect. The other major player in the mood-building is Aaron Hewitt's evocative score, which nimbly keeps pace with Ayoade's tonal eclecticism, skipping from claustrophobic strings to blipping percussion to 70's Japanese crooners without batting an eyelid.
Those soundscapes give an inkling of the unusualness of Ayoade's work here but don't be fooled, The Double traverses some dark, dark territory. Anyone who has had a moment of crippling self-doubt will recognise that discomfort here, only magnified to an excruciating degree. Ayoade's neurotic humour lightens the tone somewhat but the further in he takes you into this world, the more disorienting it becomes becomes. The overall vision gets necessarily distorted towards the end and perhaps begins to rely a little too heavily on its eerie atmosphere but that atmosphere is so superbly sustained, that it is difficult to feel cheated.
The Double is a suffocating journey into psychosis, with a twisted comic edge. Ayoade wears his influences well, to the point of shaking fatuous comparison. If he continues down this path, he'll be standing shoulder to shoulder with Mr. Gilliam in no time. That's if he's not already stalking him.
★★★★
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