The Double

What happens if you are a genuinely nice person? Willing to go the extra mile for others, always submissive to the wishes of your family and are generally a nice guy. You are taken for granted and treated like dirt. By your folks, colleagues and even the girl you so fancy treats you as a nonexistent entity.

As if this was not discouraging enough, a new colleague joins who is identical to you in appearance but has the completely opposite personality.

A smart telling of the Dostoevsky novel about a person who has the capacity to tolerate everything but his own double whose existence causes him a dilemma: continue to silently tolerate everything or change and adapt.

Perhaps not the easiest of movies to watch but its quirky wit and creative cinematography will win you over.

This is a seriously weird and disturbing movie that initially looks like it's going to come across as a bit of a 21st Century downmarket version of Brazil. Our hero experiences a sequence of unsettling events, seemingly unconnected and apparently trivial to a degree, although clearly aiming to tee up some of the later action.

The lighting, the sounds, the camera shots are all wonderfully done, setting a disturbing and unsettling atmosphere that gently but with increasing urgency begins to throw a blanket of latent claustrophobia across characters and happenings. We witness curious incidents and are left to guess their significance, our hero reaches out to the girl but is beaten to the jump by....who exactly?

How much of what we see actually takes place is questionable. How much some of the latter scenes make sense even more so. Yet, as it twists and turns towards the denouement, I found myself gripped and engaged to an uncommon degree. It is a difficult movie as it winds up, no question, but I find the notion that anyone feeling suicidal needs warning before viewing as slightly hysterical.

On the one hand, this is an easy film to describe, whether you reference the source material, or your talk about the doppleganger and what it might be like to find one has a double. Yet on the other hand, it's almost impossible to sum this up after one viewing, as there felt like there are so many little bits and pieces that suddenly reveal themselves to your eyes and ears. that you're forced to think about going back to sit back through it again. The question is, which one of you will go...?

Bottom line: I think The Double is 100% worth the watch if you like weird, stylized things, but it does suffer from an unfulfilling ending. If you're not generally into "weird stuff", then this is probably not going to be the film for you. Worth mentioning that it is very bleak and confusing at times.

If this had a better ending to tie it up then it would have easily been an 8+

The Double takes you for a real ride. It's effective at making you feel a sense of non-stop stress and dread, while remaining very engaging. You feel like you can't look away without missing something right until the end.

The atmosphere is great, portraying a truly bleak, dystopian nightmare. The set design is really interesting and has a unique vibe. The work they do at the company, and many other things about the world in general, is vague in a way that they really pull off to build an effective tone.

Unfortunately, I felt the ending was unfulfilling. The ending itself is fine enough, and some of the stuff they introduce there is cool, but it doesn't feel like a real conclusion. It didn't wrap up as nicely as it seemed like it was going to, and when looking at it closer there's a lot of tough logical holes. When discussing it after there was lots of "but if *that* theory was right, then *this* thing wouldn't have happened" and it just didn't seem like any one narrative fit correctly.

Overall, I really liked the experience. It was very cerebral, very weird, and very "interesting" (in it's own bleak and unexciting way). I enjoyed it all the way through, but was let down by the ending not being fulfilling enough.

I was surprised to see the bad reviews on IMDb. This is actually the most creative, enigmatic, philosophical and visually stunning film I've seen in a long time (and MUCH better than the disappointing Villeneuve's "Enemy"). Every scene is made in an unusual and unexpected way...enhancing the awkwardness of the characters and the story as a whole. From the very first 10 minutes I knew I was watching something really special.

"Submarine" was cute, but this is the film that definitely makes Ayoade one of the most promising directors nowadays. Can't wait to see what he's gonna do next.

Everybody thinks they are special. Everybody thinks they are unique. Everybody also thinks there is someone deep down that can and must come out so they are better people. As our protagonist thought. But in this case, that person was not that great but was what our protagonist thought he was missing.

I am not familiar with Dostoevskys book but this adaptation from Ayoade was really more like Kafka. A bizarre story set in a bureaucratic, soul-less environment where humanity tries to come out like a flower through concrete. Or as an obnoxious douchebag.

But the memorable Brazil-like imagery aside it's a few degrees too weird and loses you a bit.