The Double (Richard Ayoade, 2014)

[bainbridgezu]

Richard Ayoade's The Double with Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska

This footage reminds me very much of The Conformist (of which Wasikowska is a professed fan, funnily enough).

[ianungstad]

Richard Ayoade's The Double with Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska

This footage reminds me very much of The Conformist (of which Wasikowska is a professed fan, funnily enough).

Excellent teaser trailer. The reviews are starting to trickle in from Toronto. Lots of praise for this.

[domino harvey]

Acquired by Magnolia

[bainbridgezu]

New footage

[wllm995]

A very interesting work that reminded me a lot of Terry Gilliam's in its tone and art design. It is its own beast though and was noteworthy both for its visual sense and its choices of music throughout. It started off strong and continued through until it sort of tapered off at the very end (it sort of disappointed me a bit - it might not for you).

Definitely worth checking out and I'd give it an 8.5 out of 10.

[Red Screamer]

Vastly underappreciated. Sure Ayoade wears his influences on his sleeve, but that hardly matters when he makes enough smart decisions here to prove himself a more-than-capable director in his own right. Jesse Eisenberg has the time of his life in a masterstroke of dual-typecasting that instantly made me grin. The editing and great Andrew Hewitt score take the movie from a grand sprint to a lurching crawl and back again, making the 90 minutes even more brisk than usual. And it has what is by far the best cameo of the year

SpoilerShow

the J.anitor

What The Double lacks in novelty, Ayoade makes up for with concision, wit, and effective craft. The film clearly lays out its themes early on and then focuses on making itself as emphatic as possible through a series of cringes and jabs. It works beautifully.

[tenia]

I've only watched this last week, but my overall feeling converge towards yours.
The Double does not feel original, nor does it always feel very clear, but the craftsmanship is definitely here, on directing, shooting and editing, leading to a very effective movie, which is fluid from its beginning to its end.

[colinr0380]

Spoilers:

I'll add to the praise for this film. An excellent score and production design matched with great character moments. This is a surprisingly dark tale (unsurprising if it was based on Dostoyevsky!) but also extremely amusing throughout, making most other 'black comedies' seem tame in comparison! It was great to see Ayoade populate the smaller roles with comedians (Chris O'Dowd of course, but also Chris Morris and Tim Key, all of whom play to type!), but also finding great parts for Sally Hawkins (who in one small scene here got more to do than in the entirety of the recent Godzilla film), Noah Taylor and the always just on the edge of frame James Fox! Also the briefly glimpsed bad sci-fi show on the television throughout the film, The Replicator, is fantastic and has a great role for Paddy Considine in a part very different from what I'd usually associate him with! The TV show, especially when I got to see it in full in the deleted scenes on the Blu-ray is not just thematically appropriate with The Double, but in its silly cheesiness also feels as if it is reminding the audience of the Garth Marenghi's Darkplace series.

Since I'm not familiar with the Dostoyevsky I was instead far more taken with all of the seeming filmic influences sloshing around in there. I'd agree that there are a lot of them, but I think The Double takes all of the influences and uses them for different purposes. There's obviously a bit of Kafka in the setting, and a huge dollop of Brazil (with Wallace Shawn in the Ian Holm officious middle manager part!), and in the section with the double there feels like a bit of the life takeover by a slicker doppleganger of How To Get Ahead In Advertising and in the shots in which Jesse Eisenberg shares the screen with himself there feels like an obvious Dead Ringers influence (I was also reminded of Dead Ringers in the girl swapping section, and the complete failure thereof!)

But also I wondered if Ayoade was alluding to a few other films at times - the elderly men doing admin in their cubicles as well as the wonderfully, terminally unhip office ball reminded me a little of Il Posto. The whole section of James being forced to let the double use his apartment to bring women back to, while James has to come to terms with betraying the woman he is infatuated with is reminiscent of The Apartment. And in the anonymous, dispiriting block of flats setting I was reminded of something like the first episode of Kieslowski's Dekalog. Also, and this might be really stretching references (and this likely all stems from The Tenant anyway!), but the block of flats setting and especially the yearning for and voyeurism of a dream woman opposite leading into the suicidal ending (in which a suicidal act is the only response to a dangerously uncaring world) reminded me a lot of the French film Monsieur Hire, which similarly is darkly funny until it becomes too painful to laugh anymore.

So maybe not exactly original, but it slots into the company of all of those films with great ease. I also love the poster for the film which is up there with the 70s-style poster for Enemy in terms of great recent posters:

[Lost Highway]

I truly loathed this film, which is a shame because I'd loved Ayoade's charming Submarine. Every character "stands for something" and is strictly two dimensional, not helped by Eisenberg who goes for broad caricature twice. It is cliche piled on cliche with every turn of the plot as expected. I hated the "Terry Gilliam on a budget" look of the film, which many have been praising. The visual design of the film dramatically suffocates it, because everything seem to be arranged around it and yet it never even looks that great. It reminded me more of sets built for an 80s TV special (Pee-Wee's Playhouse goes Kafka) than some visionary world building along the lines of a Lynch, Gilliam, Wes Anderson or even early Jeunet. 20 minutes in I was desperate to get out of the cinema, but I stayed because of the person I'd gone with. Afterwards we discover we both would have happily left soon after it started. I can't even quite verbalise why I hated the film so much, it's visual poverty of imagination and its mock existentialist posturing just sucked the life out of me while I was watching it.

[colinr0380]

I would not agree but maybe 'Terry Gilliam on a budget' worked for the film in the sense that there is no huge Brazil-ian conspiracy to face down or monolithic malfunctioning technology to battle (though I loved the photocopier the size of an entire room!), just crappy co-workers, which is bad enough! Even our hero has no escapist daydreams to speak of, instead the best he has is a campy sci-fi show on television, a television he pawns for the earrings. He is so far at a remove that it makes sense that he only really experiences the more vibrant events through a proxy. It is a brutally mundane film in that sense, but I always found it visually interesting in its oppressiveness.

I would agree with you though that there is a sense of no escape, even a horrible sense of being railroaded to the inevitable suicide, itself doubling the one at the beginning of the film.

SpoilerShow

Although this does have a happier ending than the complete crushings of the characters that occur in Brazil/Monsieur Hire/The Tenant/How To Get Ahead In Advertising and so on! It is slightly more in The Apartment vein! Or maybe even Punch-Drunk Love!

[Lost Highway]

I get that The Double isn't actually supposed to be like Brazil, I just found the use of that type of visual vocabulary tiresome, especially as Gilliam himself has been flogging that look over the decades to ever diminishing effect.

In the end I had a visceral reaction to The Double which I can't even properly verbalise. It's rare that there is absolutely nothing about a film that I like, but this was that rare film.

I got it off my chest now.

[Lost Highway]

...and just to contradict myself, a film which could be called "Gilliamesque" and which I liked a lot was Snowpiercer. It was the best Terry Gilliam film Gilliam had not made since Twelve Monkeys.

[domino harvey]

Sad to say but I found this awful. I have little patience with intentionally ugly films, and the pervasive aesthetic grotesqueries quickly outgrew their already limited welcome. It doesn't help that the film has no clear linethrough of what it wants to be, other than relentlessly negative-- Is it a comedy of institutional frustration? A satire of emasculation? A commentary on passiveness and the role it plays in loneliness? Probably, but every stab the film takes in the piss-colored dark at these themes are bluntly executed and tonally mismatched. This is a film that confuses obfuscation with insight, and falls victim time and again to stylistic grace notes it hasn't earned. I thought Submarine was far from perfect but had its moments and was at the very least pretty to look at. This is Ayoade coming down too hard in the opposite direction. It also takes real perverse talent to mute and misuse two of my favorite young actors, Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska, and completely remove anything of interest from their interactions (alone or together!) despite the fact that the actors themselves entered into a romantic relationship while filming, meaning Ayoade actively worked against their shared charisma to achieve the nothingness on-screen. Just a tiresome and empty zero of a movie.

[Mr. Deltoid]

I’ll be honest; I really wasn’t looking forward to this one, especially after Submarine, where Ayoade’s showy direction succeeded in mostly smothering the film’s story. That affected style is still on display, though it services the plot much better here as this is a more surreally abstract tale. Yet that in itself is not necessarily a recommendation!

The trouble is that the film’s homage’s (as listed above, there’s too many to mention!) are so omnipresent that there’s nothing original to respond to. The retro-futurist design looks good, but it doesn’t feel like an advance upon the visions of Gilliam or Junet. Ayoade is obviously a cine-literate guy (what director worth their salt isn’t?) but you get the sense he’s a more of a cinematic crate-digger than someone with their own, autonomous vision. Compare Ayoade to a contemporary like Peter Strickland (who’s Berberian Sound Studio has a similar ‘interior’ feel to it) and you begin to feel the disparity between an astute, if derivative, filmmaker and another who routinely transcends his influences.

Maybe that’s a bit harsh, but I feel the film to have been absurdly over-praised in some quarters. Coincidently, last week I found myself revisiting Basil Dearden’s The Man Who Haunted Himself, which plays the whole doppelganger scenario absolutely straight and is all the more compelling for it!
I did laugh at the bit where Tim Key discloses his weapon though!