Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

The Double Blu-ray Movie Review

Who Are You? (I Really Wanna Know)

Reviewed by Michael Reuben August 31, 2014

There are obvious similarities between The Double, the second feature from director and co-writer Richard Ayoade, and Terry Gilliam's Brazil. Both exist in alternative worlds constructed from objects and landscapes that are familiar but stuck together oddly and that operate according to their own internal logic, and in both films the very fabric of reality seems to rise up against the hero's efforts to achieve freedom and happiness. But Ayoade and Gilliam have different sensibilities, and The Double is an entirely different experience from Brazil, despite the latter's obvious visual influence (although that influence could just as readily be attributed to Metropolis, which was also a key precursor to Brazil).

Brazil pitted the individual against a repressive state that cloaked its totalitarian behavior in a benevolent guise of efficiently providing freedom, security and essential services like air conditioning, but The Double's adversary is . . . well, that's the question. Ayoade and co-writer Avi Korine (brother of filmmaker Harmony Korine, with whom he wrote Mister Lonely) have freely adapted a novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, retaining the Russian author's psychological focus, but externalizing everything that Dostoyevsky left ambiguously inside his protagonist's head. In Ayoade's darkly comic fantasy, the hero really does have a double, and deciding just exactly who and what he is—an issue that Ayoade leaves open for interpretation—is an important element of the film's appeal.

In an unnamed city, in an unspecified country, at an indefinite time, Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg) works in a nondescript cubicle crunching numbers for some obscure purpose. The company provides data processing services. Its spokesperson and titular CEO is known as "The Colonel" (James Fox), and his avuncular presence is felt mostly through TV ads, where his motto is: "There are no special people, just people." Although Simon has held his job for seven years, his presence barely registers, and his immediate superior, Mr. Papadopoulos (Wallace Shawn), thinks he just started. Perhaps because Papadopoulos sees Simon as low man on the totem pole, he assigns Simon the job of tutoring his resentful teenage daughter, Melanie (Yasmin Paige, one of many returning cast members from Ayoade's first feature, Submarine), in the basics of accounting.

Shy and inward, Simon is one of those people against whom the world seems arrayed in opposition. In an empty subway car, another passenger demands his seat, and Simon complies. When he loses his briefcase in the subway door, he no longer has the second ID necessary to gain entrance to his office, and the same guard (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) who has admitted him every working day for the past seven years treats him like a criminal. The waitress (Cathy Moriarity) at the diner where he eats every day bullies him, and he's regarded as a failure by the mother on whom he spends most of his salary to pay for her nursing home (Phyllis Somerville, who played a similar role in the first season of House of Cards).

Simon has two pleasures in life. The first is a cheesy sci-fi TV show called "The Replicator" featuring a swaggering hero named Jack (Paddy Considine, another Submarine veteran). The other is the pretty blonde from work he's been admiring from afar for a long time. Her name is Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), she works the copying machine, and she also lives in an apartment across the street from Simon, where he watches her through a telescope. After trying and failing to talk to Hannah for months, Simon finds the ice broken by a chance encounter when a police incident in front of their buildings brings residents into the street and Hannah and Simon recognize each other. He begins to work up the nerve to invite Hannah to the Colonel's ball, a formal event for the entire office.

But then the double of the title appears, using the name James Simon. He looks, sounds and dresses exactly like Simon, but his personality is the opposite: bold, brash and self-confident. When Mr. Papadopoulos introduces him at the office as the latest hire, no one notices the similarity except Simon, and when Simon points it out, no one cares, not even Simon's best friend at work, Harris (Noah Taylor, also from Submarine). The relationship between the accidental twins follows a weird arc from uncomfortable silence to a kind of unbalanced friendship (with James teaching Simon how to be more assertive) to determined adversaries, as Simon comes to feel, not without reason, that James is stealing his life. Perhaps the most unsettling experience for Simon is how positively women, including Hannah, respond to James, even though they're identical. But of course they aren't.

Ironically, however, Simon's conflict with James is what finally galvanizes him to a level of action and initiative that he has probably never before managed. The outcome of his actions is dramatic, but does it accomplish what Simon wants? The Double's ending is fraught with ambiguity in ways that cannot be discussed without revealing key elements of the plot. A lot depends on the viewer's interpretation of the final frames, and even more rests on one's view of who James really is. It would be hard to make him, as Dostoyevsky at least suggested, a figment of Simon's imagination, but his connection with James runs deeper than just the accident of resemblance.

Although The Double has an elaborately engineered soundtrack (discussed at greater length under "Audio"), it isn't a loud film, and it's humor, which is considerable, is understated in the absurdist tradition that is not only British but also looks to deadpan masters like Finland's Aki Kaurismaki, a favorite of Ayoade's. A typical example occurs early in the film where Simon visits his mother, and a robotic employee of the nursing home (Tim Key) tells him that his bill has increased because of "improvements" that are nowhere to be seen. As Simon reaches into his wallet for money, the employee simply extends his hand and empties the wallet, but the punchline comes a beat later: "This isn't enough."

Later, Simon meets a pair of detectives, a jolly older one (Jon Korkes) and a serious junior colleague (Craig Roberts, the star of Submarine). Their beat is exclusively suicides, and business is brisk. When they ask Simon whether he's had any thoughts of killing himself, he immediately says no, but the cops put him down as a "maybe". That's classic Ayoade. At the most obvious level, the detectives are refusing to take Simon seriously, just like everyone around him, and besides, he looks depressed. At a deeper level, though, the exchange poses interesting questions, especially since we all know suicides, either personally or by report, whose death came as a shock even to the people closest to the victim. Is anyone ever a firm "no"? Are there people who never experience despair, despondency and hopelessness? (Look around Simon's office; they're everywhere.) James is apparently immune to such emotions, but who is he, and where does he come from? Watch The Double again and sink into its strange world, as much David Lynch as Terry Gilliam, and questions like these can't help but pop into your head, like the fragments of artworks that Hannah cuts up and tosses away for Simon to collect.

The Double Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Double was shot on film by Erik Wilson, who was Ayoade's cinematographer on Submarine. In the extras, Wilson says that they considered shooting the film in black-and-white, probably to emphasize the drabness of Simon James's existence, but opted instead for a dull palette with just a few strong colors used for strategic purposes. Hannah tends to be associated with rich shades of blue, and intense reds appear at emotional moments. Otherwise, the predominant hues are yellow, tan and gray. A comparison of the "behind the scenes" footage in the extras to the finished product will demonstrate just how much of the film's look was accomplished by color timing in post-production, courtesy of a digital intermediate (from which the Blu-ray was presumably sourced).

Magnolia Home Video's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray nicely renders the stylized world that Ayoade and his production team have created, preserving all the fine detail of the bizarre production design even in low-light scenes without strong colors to differentiate objects and surfaces. Blacks, when they occur, are truly black, which makes the various shades of gray seem all that more obvious. Contrast can be strong and eye-catching when Ayoade wants to draw your attention—usually when a scene involves Hannah or some area of the company's activity from which Simon feels excluded—or it can be deliberately understated, so that both Simon and the viewer strain to make out a sight in the distance. A fine grain pattern from the original film negative remains visible, but it is so fine that most viewers won't even notice it.

In a growing (and unfortunate) trend, Magnolia has placed The Double on a BD-25, and the bitrate is a surprisingly low 18.00 Mbps—"surprisingly", because the image wasn't originated digitally. However, despite the low average bitrate, The Double doesn't suffer from any of the telltale signs of overcompression. The compressionist must have been able to achieve this result by careful allocation, especially in the first half of the film, before Simon's double appears, when his life is characterized by stasis and the film has many static shots. Still, one has to wonder how much better The Double could have looked with the greater bandwidth allowed by a BD-50.

The Double Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Ayoade has said that he spent months working with his mixing and effects crew on The Double's 5.1 soundtrack, which is presented here in lossless DTS-HD MA. It's a memorable track full of odd sounds that have little to do with realism. At least on a sonic level, one could argue that The Double is all happening inside the disturbed mind of someone who imagines that he's both Simon James and James Simon (and may be neither). In one telling example, the two "co-workers" exit the office together, and their footsteps are loudly audible; then they both stop to wait for a bus, and the footsteps continue.

Even before James appears, Simon hears odd sounds, like the loud ticks of clocks in the office, possibly counting down the remainder of his life, or a distant roar, as if the thoughts of others were pressing in on him (a cold washcloth on the head stills the din). Of course, the various machines in the office, as well as the subway, elevators and various elements in Simon's apartment building all have distinctive aural signatures, none of them quite like anything in the world as we know it. All of these have been placed in the surround environment and blended with the dramatic, even melodramatic, score by Andrew Hewitt (another Submarine veteran) and a few eccentric musical choices like the 1963 hit "Sukiyaki", the only Japanese-language song ever to top the Billboard 100 charts in the United States.

The Double Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Cast and Characters (1080p; 1.78:1; 4:30): Eisenberg, Wasikowska, Shawn, Paige and Moriarty describe their characters and how they approached playing them.



• Creating The Double: The Story and Design (1080p; 1.78:1; 4:46): Producers Robin C. Fox and Amina Dasmal, co-writer Avi Korine, DP Erik Wilson, art director David Krank and director Ayoade discuss the origin of the film and its visual style.



• Behind the Scenes Comparisons (1080p; 1.78:1; 4:25): This interesting assembly of footage from various sets and locations is self-explanatory once you've seen the film. It is entitled "comparisons" because an inset window occasionally appears in the corner, especially in the latter half, displaying the corresponding footage from the completed film.



• Interview with Director Richard Ayoade (1080p; 1.78:1; 6:22): This wide-ranging interview makes one wish that Ayoade had recorded a commentary, because he's articulate and informative.



• AXS TV: A Look at The Double (1080p; 1.78:1; 3:02): This is a typical AXS TV promo, in which the film's trailer is expanded with interview clips. The segments with Jesse Eisenberg appear to be from an interview not included in these extras.



• Trailer (1080p; 1.85:1; 2:23).



• Also from Magnolia Home Entertainment: The disc includes trailers for Filth, Nymphomaniac: Volume I, The Protector 2 and The Sacrament, as well as promos for the Chideo web service and AXS TV. These also play at startup, where they can be skipped with the chapter forward button.



• BD-Live: As of this writing, attempting to access BD-Live gave the message "Check back for updates".

The Double Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

As Ayoade notes in his interview, a psychological novella like The Double differs from the writings of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, in which the individual must battle against an encroaching and almost omnipotent state authority. The same essential distinction separates Ayoade's film from Brazil. In Brazil, Sam Lowry begins as a lowly government employee, but he doesn't experience real freedom until he joins the rebellion against the state that he's served all his life. Sam escapes (after a fashion), but the state endures. In The Double, by contrast, the state's only representatives are a few policemen. No one is "after" Simon James, or trying to run his life. They barely notice him, even after his exact double appears out of nowhere one day. Imagine if Kafka's Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect—and no one cared. Now that's alienation. Highly recommended.