The Double

Richard Ayoade’s 2013 The Double, based on a Dostoevsky novella, is a dark comedy in every sense of the word. It takes place in a shrouded world, where all trains run underground, all lights are dim or flickering, where the few outdoor scenes occur at night.

The comedy comes mainly at the expense of the lead character, Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg), a self-effacing, kind-hearted, somewhat creepy loser who feels as if he is invisible, a “Pinocchio” rather than a real boy, so wispy that he thinks someone could stick a hand right through him. In the opening scene, he is riding home from work in an empty subway car when another patron stands before Simon and tells, “You’re in my seat.” After a long pause during which Simon surveys the empty seats around him, he moves. Once home in his one-room apartment, he spends his evenings watching Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), a co-worker who lives across the courtyard, through a telescope. When Simon goes to work every morning, the security guard doesn’t recognize him, even though he’s been at the company seven years and even though he fills out a pass every morning.

Simon can imagine the man he would like to be – the self-confident man who gets noticed, the man whose skill is noticed at work, the man who could attract Hannah. That imaginary Simon suddenly materializes at work in the person of James Simon (also played by Jesse Eisenberg). James gets Simon to do his work for him, but James takes the credit; James seduces Hannah (along with numerous other women); James rises in the company, while Simon is eventually fired.

Simon realizes that James is another self, who suffers the injuries that are inflicted on Simon. To get rid of him, Simon jumps from the ledge of his building, and kills James. In the ambulance afterward, Simon wakes up. Hannah is there, and so is Simon’s employer, “The Colonel.” “There aren’t many like you,” the Colonel says, though he has never really seen Simon before. “I like to think I’m pretty unique,” Simon says. The moral is: Don’t try to be someone you’re not; you’re a-OK just as you are.

In Dostoevsky’s story, the “Simon” character goes mad and the last scene has him shuffled off to an asylum. By turning the story into a morality tale, Ayoade not only flinches from the starkness of the world he’s created but risks incoherence. If Simon can kill James by killing himself, is James simply a projection of Simon’s brain? If so, the film makes little sense. Late in the film, we enter a horror world where projections turn into real persons. But we didn’t know we were in that world for most of the film.

Until the third act, The Double captures the black humor of Dostoevsky’s novella and for that, if for nothing else, it is a remarkable film.