10th edtion CIFF – 10-14 April 2024

Double, The (2015 Feature Film)

Richard Ayoade | United Kingdom | 2014 | 93 min | English

What if ‘you’ were your new colleague? And what if ‘you’ prove more fun and more popular than yourself? While ‘you’ get you to do all the work? And ‘you’ even snap up the girl of your dreams? Well, then you’d be in this playful Kafkaesque nightmare.

Simon James, a timid man in a dreary, grey high-rise world is ignored by colleagues and superiors alike at his deadening office job, which is extra painful when it comes to Hannah – the girl of his dreams – who works in the copy room. But then his department hires someone new, James Simon. He looks exactly like Simon, but almost everyone takes to him straight away. What starts out as friendship between the two doubles quickly takes a sinister turn.

Based on Dostoyevsky’s eponymous novel, director Richard Ayoade has created a dystopian alternative reality in which Simon threatens to be crushed in a Kafkaesque manner by an impersonal society in which everyone’s just a number.

Ayoade is proud of his influences – Terry Gilliam’s Brazil being a particularly clear inspiration, but tells a very idiosyncratic and extremely contemporary tale. What’s left of you, if everyone’s the same?

Place: The Cinemas 6

Date: 03/26/2015

Time: 22:00:00

Duration: 01:45:00

Place: The Cinemas 2

Date: 03/27/2015

Time: 14:30:00

Duration: 01:45:00

Year in
Festival

2015

Director

Richard Ayoade

Camera

Erik Wilson

Cast

Jesse Eisenberg
Mia Wasikowska
Wallace Shawn
Yasmin Paige
Noah Taylor
James Fox
Cathy Moriarty

Country

United Kingdom

Editor

Chris Dickens
Nick Fenton

Language

English

Length

93 min

Music

Andrew Hewitt

Producer

Amina Dasmal
Lydia Ayoade
Robin C. Fox

Production Company

Chicken Leg Ltd

Production Design

David Crank

Sales

x

Scenario

Richard Ayoade
Avi Korine
based on the novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Sound Design

Adam Armitage
Andy Kennedy

Year of Production

2014

Website

Richard AYOADE (1977, UK) was born to a Nigerian father and a Norwegian mother and studied Law at Cambridge. He started his career as a comedian and co-wrote, acted in and directed TV series such as Garth Marenghi’s DarkplaceThe Mighty Boosh and The IT CrowdThe Double is his second feature film.