Review of The Double (2014) by Davey M — 05 Jan 2015

Richard Ayoade's (loose) adaptation of the Dostoevsky novella manages to capture all of the book's darkly comic anxiety, while building on a subsequent century's worth of thought--Freud, Jung, Kafka, Orwell, Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW and Polanski's THE TENANT and Gilliam's BRAZIL and Scorsese's AFTER HOURS--infusing it with his own remarkable formal energy and precision, and making the whole thing feel timely (corporations are people!--but people aren't--and the terribleness of the modern alpha male is really just terrible, particularly with regards to conversations around sexuality), timeless (self-loathing never gets old), and, in spite of its many literary and cinematic forebears, utterly one-of-a-kind.

Remarkable, firing-on-all-cylinders filmmaking, this frenetic, frenzied fever dream, this triumph of design, this mad, hilarious, troubled trip deserves far more attention than it received in its too-limited limited release.

(How could a movie this astonishing and exhilarating gross $200,000? Et tu, box office? If Ayoade doesn't have the amazing career he deserves after the one-two punch of SUBMARINE and THE DOUBLE, it's on all our heads and we should be ashamed of ourselves.

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