Director: Richard Ayoade
Talent: Jesse Eisenberg, Mia Wasikowska, Chris O’Dowd, Sally Hawkins
Release Date: 4th April 2014
Richard Ayoade’s second feature is an adaptation of the Dostoevsky novel of the same name, in which a man is driven insane by the appearance of his doppelganger. Beyond its magnificent, striking tricolour aesthetic, he beauty of The Double, and indeed its horror, lies in the fundamental challenge it poses to the conditions by which the commonsense ideology of individualism reasserts itself. On one hand, Jesse Eisenberg’s Simon is alienated from his work, from his colleagues and from the possibility of any kind of intimacy with Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), the woman he admires from afar, while on the other he deals with social pressures on all sides (excessive demands on productivity, his double’s misogynistic advice re: picking up women, etc.) to submit himself to the conditions of a sociality that excludes humanity. If violence is the enacting of a symbolic deadlock, then Ayoade’s film evokes such in its very grammar. This is a black comedy that provokes and disturbs seemingly beyond the constraints of its form, the implications of which will stay with the viewer long after the credits roll. – Oisín Murphy-Hall
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWhikLYeSQ0
