The Double

The Double isn't an original idea. It wasn't even in Dostoyevsky's time. But it's a great story. And Ayoade has produced a brilliant copy.

This workplace-as-hellscape is not new territory, exactly — the story's based on Dostoevsky, plays like Kafka, and looks like an Orwellian nightmare. But who'd complain, since it lets Jesse Eisenberg offer what amounts to an acting master-class.

Kafka-esque, Terry Gilliam-esque (Brazil), Charlie Kaufman-esque (remember Floor 71/2 in Being John Malkovich?), and David Lynch-ian, too, The Double plays like a nightmare that will leave you spooked, jittery, and confused. Well, that's how it plays for Simon, anyway. For everyone else, it should leave us simply amused.

Beneath all The Double’s cynicism, misanthropy, intense stylization, and distance lies a core of genuine tragedy, and that’s what gives the film an emotional resonance beyond its aesthetic achievements.

Eisenberg, perfectly, pliably put upon, is the engine that drives this picture.

Undeniably impressive as a visual-psychological construct, The Double is ultimately a rigid, one-joke movie that feels hard pressed to sustain any sort of momentum over the course of its 92-minute running time.

Without a character to really care about, the movie just comes off as fraught and over-stylized.

Get **** into a nightmarish but very funny tale of absurdity, bureaucratic insanity and madness based on Dostoyevsky's novel (skyrocketing to the top of my reading list), peppered with a dash of Kafka and a pinch of Ayoade's very own sensibilities. It's even better than 'Submarine', very high praise in my book! Jesse Eisenberg, on double duty, is simultaneously hilarious and believable, and the feel and rhythms of the stylish, bold and sublimely weird movie he's carrying wholly unique.

The comparisons (fairly or unfairly) to Villeneuve's "Enemy" are unavoidable in this doppelganger movie. And while this movie at times is rather interesting and thought provoking, it doesn't stack up compared to "Enemy".

In spite of its surrealism resulting in quite a disjointed narrative and its occasional propensity towards the painfully dull, Richard Ayoade actually offers an expert analysis of depression, loneliness and alienation.

The movie has an interesting start and stylish it is also quite tasteful. It reminds me a bit of Brazil. However I believe the story is too boring. Nothing ever happens and it feels like an anticlimax!

the actor is really boring and you can't care about the movie because it's boring and he ****. when a movie's main character is terrible the movie is unwatchable.