The Double, A Film About a Man Whose Life Is Taken Over by a Doppelganger

The Double is a film directed and written by Richard Ayoade based on the 1846 novel of the same name by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The film, which stars Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska, is about a man named Simon who finds his life being taken over by a doppelganger who looks just like him, but is wildly more confident and successful. The film debuted at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival.

When Simon (Jesse Eisenberg) gets to work he finds that this double has usurped his tenuous position in the company. Routinely humiliated by his boss (played to perfection by Wallace Shawn), the neurotic Simon now has to deal with a doppelgänger that is everything he isn’t: confident, charming, successful, superficial.

Eisenberg plays both roles with complete conviction. As Simon, he is fatally ineffectual, unable to communicate his ideas at work even when they’re brilliant — and a desperate failure when it comes to the woman of his dreams, played by Mia Wasikowska. On the other hand Eisenberg plays Simon’s double as a gloss on his performance in The Social Network: a character fed by the fumes of his own ego. To watch the two of them battle in Ayoade’s seamless movie magic is to see an eternal psychic struggle come to life.

via The Awesomer