Five Things We Learned From ‘The Double’

Fans of The IT Crowd may be hanging out for more screen-time from Richard Ayoade — who made the curly-mopped outcast Moss such a cuddly portrait of emotional infancy — but right now the English actor is back in directing mode with The Double, an absurdist fable that plays like a pitch-black spin on The IT Crowd’s suffocating workplace purgatory. Following the tender but frank coming-of-age film Submarine (his much-loved 2010 directorial debut), Ayoade helms the weird tale of Jesse Eisenberg’s luckless clerk Simon James facing off against a completely opposite double of himself — named James Simon, naturally.

Here’s what we learned from watching it.

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1. It’s a mind-meld with Dostoyevsky and Harmony Korine’s brother

Ayoade co-wrote The Double with Avi Korine, brother to infamous filmmaker Harmony Korine (Spring Breakers, Gummo) and co-writer of Harmony’s 2007 quirkfest, Mister Lonely. Avi came up with the story, adapted from an 1846 novella by Russian literary giant Fyodor Dostoyevsky. While the original story’s descent into madness is intact in the movie, the adaptation ramps up the anxious comedy, wringing a surprising amount of laughs out of a mundane workplace stranded in a dystopian society. You needn’t have read any Dostoyevsky to appreciate it, and it’s really more in line with Monty Python and such Ayoade-involved British comedies as Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and The Mighty Boosh.

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2. It’s harshly funny… and often just harsh

Jesse Eisenberg plays a clerk named Simon who has worked for the same government agency for seven years — yet his boss still calls him by the wrong name. So far, so typical, but the film takes an uncommon joy in punishing Simon at every turn. As constricting as his work life is, home is even worse thanks to his bitter, elderly mother. Feeling “lost and lonely and invisible”, Simon wallows in his own inadequacy while pining for co-worker Hannah (played with angelic blankness and an inscrutable accent by Mia Wasikowska), in whom he senses a kindred spirit. Portents of doom become reliable punchlines, and a lot of jokes hinge on Simon’s pitifulness. A co-worker calls him “a bit of a non-person”, and, in light of a rash of suicides, a cop sizes him up and declares, “Put him down as a maybe.”

It’s brutal, but also really, really funny. Simon is stuck in a universe where he’s thwarted at every turn and never allowed to forget his sorry state. “I know I’m a disappointment,” he admits at one point. Against a setting and era that’s intentionally kept alien (cue foreign-language music and a fantasy currency), he struggles with farcical, failing technology and… pretty much everything else.

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3. Jesse Eisenberg gets to cut loose

The role of Simon plays up to Jesse Eisenberg’s natural stiffness, but he gets to really cut loose and play against type as the assertive, can’t-lose, alpha male James, Simon’s double. Exaggerating the divide between life’s winners and losers, James is an instant hero both at work and with the ladies. At first nobody notices the likeness between the two — despite them having the same clothes and haircut even — and there’s a lot of abrasive humour in their interplay. Eisenberg energises both roles, and for about ten minutes The Double feels like a bizarro buddy-comedy, with James giving Simon sex advice and brawling in a bar.

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4. It belongs in the canon of uncomfortable, absurdist comedies

If you love David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991), Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) or Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), you’ll settle right into the circular dream logic and caustic laughs here. Cited influences on the dystopian setting, meanwhile, include David Lynch’s grotesque black comedy Eraserhead (1977) and Jean-Luc Godard’s future-noir Alphaville (1965). And anyone familiar with Billy Wilder’s classic The Apartment (1960) will recognise a nod to that film when James borrows the key to Simon’s apartment for a revolving door of late-night trysts.

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5. J Mascis from Dinosaur Jr. makes a cameo — twice

Early in the film, Simon runs across Dinosaur Jr.’s famously laconic guitar god J Mascis, who tells him in a deadpan drawl, “You shouldn’t be doin’ that.” It’s basically an indie-rock in-joke — let’s not forget that Ayoade has directed videos and a doco for Arctic Monkeys — but it totally works. There are many familiar faces from Submarine as well, including Noah Taylor, Sally Hawkins and Submarine’s young stars Craig Roberts and Yasmin Paige. Cathy Moriarty of Raging Bull fame steals several scenes as a disgruntled diner waitress, while Paddy Considine plays the fleeting hero in a recurring parody of Dr Who.

But the best cameo comes from Ayoade’s IT Crowd co-star Chris O’Dowd, who’s gone on to make his mark in Bridesmaids, Girls and more. It’s short but hilarious, crackling with exactly the left-field comic energy you’d expect from them both.

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The Double opens in theatres this Thursday.

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Doug Wallen is Editor of Mess + Noise and Music Editor of The Big Issue. He also writes for Rolling Stone, TheVine, FasterLouder and The Thousands.