‘Chaos is order yet undeciphered...’
I’ve written before about how Hollywood has this weird habit of making the same film twice in a very short space of time. In 2006, after no films about magicians in years, both The Prestige and The Illusionist dropped. In 2005 Capote cleaned up at the Oscars but that didn’t stop Infamous from covering the same ground a year later. In 2013, we had two separate films about doppelgangers The first was a faithful rendering of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s seminal novella The Double starring Jesse Eisenberg and directed by Richard Ayoade, the second was this adaptation of José Saramago novel (also called The Double) from Jake Gyllenhaal and director Denis Villeneuve. Curiously, neither of them really gets to the heart of why their respective source materials are so compelling…
Adam (Gyllenhaal) is a college professor who lives a mundane repetitive life with his girlfriend Mary (Mélanie Laurent). He is jolted out of his routine when he spots his exact double in the background of a film he is watching. Adam seeks out his doppelganger and both men struggle to come to terms with the reality of the situation.
As a Villeneuve picture, everything, of course, looks beautiful. Adam’s sombre apartment is cloaked in shadow while his double lives a more bright and colourful life with his stunning wife Helen (Sarah Gordon). The Canadian director also imbues everything with a slowly rising sense of dread ably aided by Danny Bensi’s creeping score. The problem is that he never really explores the reality of the situation in any great depth. Gyllenhaal is excellent, subtly making Adam and Anthony different enough so that the viewer always knows who is who. Neither Laurent nor Gordon are given loads to do, the camera instead is always seeking out Gyllenhaal who appears in every scene.
The film meanders along to its charged conclusion but by the end, we haven’t really spent enough time with the characters to truly care for them. Part of this is perhaps due to Gyllenhaal’s detached performance, but it is also that there just isn’t enough plot here. I must admit, however, that the final scene is genuinely fucking nightmarish.
Fans of Villeneuve and Gyllenhaal will find enough to enjoy here to justify the running time, but everyone else can probably skip it.