The Double (2013)
Country: GB
Technical: col 93m
Director: Richard Ayoade
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, Wallace Shawn, Noah Taylor
Synopsis:
A shy, clumsy young functionary in an anonymous, information-gathering corporation barely makes an impression on anyone, whether employer or fellow employees, but faithfully visits and pays for his dementia-suffering mother in a macabre nursing home, and at least manages one date with the fragile girl he brushes past every day and who lives in the flat opposite his. Then a new worker arrives who is his opposite, even down to his name, and who, after token attempts to tutor him in the art of self-assurance, eclipses him completely in a spiralling nightmare of Kafkaesque proportions.
Review:
In fact based on a Dostoyevsky novella, Ayoade's script is a tragi-comic meditation on the place of the human soul within the state, with a note-perfect performance from Eisenberg. Looking every bit like a Guillermo Del Toro film shot in Hackney, the production wears its many technical sleights of hand lightly and is both sardonically relaxed and OCD at the same time. While Simon is both frustratingly passive and not without questionable behaviours of his own, he nevertheless has a moral compass, whereas James behaves as if he were the only person in the world.
Country: GB
Technical: col 93m
Director: Richard Ayoade
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, Wallace Shawn, Noah Taylor
Synopsis:
A shy, clumsy young functionary in an anonymous, information-gathering corporation barely makes an impression on anyone, whether employer or fellow employees, but faithfully visits and pays for his dementia-suffering mother in a macabre nursing home, and at least manages one date with the fragile girl he brushes past every day and who lives in the flat opposite his. Then a new worker arrives who is his opposite, even down to his name, and who, after token attempts to tutor him in the art of self-assurance, eclipses him completely in a spiralling nightmare of Kafkaesque proportions.
Review:
In fact based on a Dostoyevsky novella, Ayoade's script is a tragi-comic meditation on the place of the human soul within the state, with a note-perfect performance from Eisenberg. Looking every bit like a Guillermo Del Toro film shot in Hackney, the production wears its many technical sleights of hand lightly and is both sardonically relaxed and OCD at the same time. While Simon is both frustratingly passive and not without questionable behaviours of his own, he nevertheless has a moral compass, whereas James behaves as if he were the only person in the world.
Country: GB
Technical: col 93m
Director: Richard Ayoade
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, Wallace Shawn, Noah Taylor
Synopsis:
A shy, clumsy young functionary in an anonymous, information-gathering corporation barely makes an impression on anyone, whether employer or fellow employees, but faithfully visits and pays for his dementia-suffering mother in a macabre nursing home, and at least manages one date with the fragile girl he brushes past every day and who lives in the flat opposite his. Then a new worker arrives who is his opposite, even down to his name, and who, after token attempts to tutor him in the art of self-assurance, eclipses him completely in a spiralling nightmare of Kafkaesque proportions.
Review:
In fact based on a Dostoyevsky novella, Ayoade's script is a tragi-comic meditation on the place of the human soul within the state, with a note-perfect performance from Eisenberg. Looking every bit like a Guillermo Del Toro film shot in Hackney, the production wears its many technical sleights of hand lightly and is both sardonically relaxed and OCD at the same time. While Simon is both frustratingly passive and not without questionable behaviours of his own, he nevertheless has a moral compass, whereas James behaves as if he were the only person in the world.