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| Grade: B+ |
*This review was originally published on Movie Mezzanine.
The Double opens with a medium close-up shot of Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg), seated in a moving train. The lights in the tunnel fill the frame intermittently, as do the eerily flickering lights in the train car. Simon seems lost in the disturbing harmony of the moment until silence is interrupted by a mysterious man telling him that he is occupying the man’s seat. The next shot shows the car to be nearly empty, but Simon complies with absolute meekness and spends the rest of the ride stood, leaving the seat to the man. This small interaction in the opening sequence summarizes the state of Simon’s life, his timid character and his infatuation with a coworker – a woman we first meet here as Simon’s gaze fixates on her through the small window to the adjacent car.
The Double is Richard Ayoade’s second feature film, following 2010’s cutesy and artfully designed Submarine. For his next try behind the camera, the British comedian has chosen to adapt Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella of the same name. In the original text, the protagonist Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin is a government employee. Here, renamed to Simon James, the man works at a mysterious company, the job of which few but Simon himself seem to understand. But the nature of the job isn’t of importance and neither are most other plot details. This is a film that conveys its story through atmosphere and mood, rather than sequential plot points. That we learn Simon’s project to be about regression analysis doesn’t tell us about the dull repetition of his job so much as the image of claustrophobic, identical cubicles in which he sits next to other nameless faces, clacking away on his keyboards as the maniacal manager Mr. Papadopoulos – a hysterically hilarious Wallace Shawn – imparts frequent wisdom about productivity.
Ayoade’s The Double is essentially timeless. It exists in a universe as much informed by Orwellian paranoia and Kafkaesque psychological terror as it is by Dostoevsky’s original text. This isn’t our contemporary office environment, nor is it of any particular time in the past. Then again, the specificities of time are unimportant, as this temporal ambiguity exaggerates the environment’s absurdity; shaping the mood is what Ayoade is aiming for. This office and Simon’s ghostly, unadorned apartment close in on the audience much as they do on Simon. Cinematographer Erik Wilson uses harsh lighting in minimal doses and leaves large portions of the frame in utter darkness, compounding the sense of mystery and extending Simon’s agitation to the audience.
