These scenes make you wish the film as a whole had foregrounded the political-parable aspect and de-emphasized the James/Simon split-personality psychodrama. The Colonel’s ad campaign, with its brittle, hollow cheer and fluent command of vapid business-speak, is among The Double’s most innovative moments. One bit of propaganda on Simon’s TV suggests the whole story may be taking place in an authoritarian dictatorship run by a figure called “the Colonel,” who also appears to be James’ and Simon’s boss. As he demonstrated in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace-a brilliant medical-melodrama pastiche whose best jokes were all about the disruption of conventional film grammar-Ayoade is a master at creating fake artifacts from a culture that resembles, but isn’t quite, our own. Occasionally a character will turn on a television and watch, and what happens on that screen within a screen is fascinating. Much of Simon’s job consists of hand-delivering photocopies around the office, but the co-workers he visits are as likely as not to be playing video games. It’s a historically scrambled world of labyrinthine office corridors, Soviet-style apartment blocks, and impossible-to-date technology. Ayoade creates a uniquely stylized dystopia, lit in dusty tones of olive and ochre and scored, mysteriously but somehow perfectly, to vintage Japanese pop. The Double’s mood of gently uncanny perversity is conveyed as much by the setting as by the story. Without seeming to try, he dazzles their irascible boss (Wallace Shawn, in top form), seduces the boss’ rebellious daughter (Yasmin Paige), and even gets his hooks into Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), the dreamy-eyed co-worker Simon has long been in love with from afar. The suavely self-assured James Simon (Eisenberg again) succeeds everywhere the stammering Simon James fails. (The screenplay, based loosely on Dostoyevsky’s story, is by Ayoade and Avi Korine.) Jesse Eisenberg plays Simon James, a low-level clerk whose lonely but stable life is upended when an employee joins his firm who looks, sounds, and even dresses exactly like him-a resemblance no one but Simon seems to notice.
As it happens he’s decided to go with, of all things, a surreal black comedy set in a vaguely Kafkaesque bureaucratic dystopia. His first feature as a director, Submarine, was a nostalgic coming-of-age romance set in 1980s Wales, lit and art-directed with painstaking attention to detail-a wisp of a film but the kind that leaves you keen to see what the director will turn to next. Ayoade is a British comedian best known for his acting roles in the cult TV series Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (which he also co-created with the show’s star Matthew Holness) and The IT Crowd.
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