THE DOUBLE

I was going to write about a blockbuster this week, but then the author Joanne Harris tweeted the advice to write what you know and to read what you don’t – ‘that way the pool gets deeper instead of shallower’.

This seemed eminently sensible, so I toddled off to exercise my brain at Richard Ayoade’s The Double, which is based on a Dostoyevsky short story, if you please – although if you want to get all A-level English student about it, it feels more chaotically Kafka.

Jesse Eisenberg, who has form playing socially isolated chaps of varying degrees (Adventureland, The Social Network), is superb as Simon James, a meek, maladroit data entrant at a mysterious firm. Despite working there for seven years, he is rarely recognised by his colleagues and indeed forgotten altogether by the surly security guard who refuses him entry when his ID card starts to play up.

The only light in Simon’s life is the fragrant Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), a colleague who lives opposite him and whom he longs to speak to but can’t work up the courage. It’s a testament to Eisenberg’s acting that, despite his character spying on Hannah with a telescope and endlessly pursuing her on the train to work, Simon comes off as clueless rather than creepy.

Simon’s life takes a further nosedive with the arrival of new worker James Simon, who is charismatic, great with people – and Simon’s exact double, right down to their preposterously oversized brown suits. But while Simon looks lost and useless in it, James wears it with the confident flair of a 1980s stockbroker (Eisenberg is terrific at making a completely new character from one psychotic eyebrow raise).

Bewildered and hurt that nobody recognises the striking similarity between them, which everyone, including Hannah, purports not to have spotted, Simon starts to veer off the rails, with James soon exploiting it for his own nefarious ends.

This is writer-actor-directorgeneral overachiever Richard Ayoade’s second directorial feature after 2010’s wonderful coming-of-age tale Submarine. Like that film, The Double has a distinctive visual feel, part Wallace and Gromit doll’s house, part Soviet nightmare – it’s frequently extremely funny, although there are enough moments of exquisite social embarrassment for you to end up gnawing on your own fist.

There are plenty of cameos by the Submarine cast, including Paddy Considine as a ludicrous sci-fi hero in a TV show beloved by the distinctly unheroic Simon. Like Wes Anderson, Ayoade flies on surreal flights of fancy, but is anchored by a welcome chunk of cynicism that prevents it from ever going over the top. The Double’s awkwardness won’t be for everyone, but Ayoade is so ridiculously good at what he does that you are bound to enter his world sooner or later.