Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
An awkward office drone becomes increasingly unhinged after a charismatic and confident look-alike takes a job at his workplace and seduces the woman he desires.
Richard Ayoade's adaptation of Dostoevsky's novella is a visually arresting neo-noir with a distinctive Kafkaesque dystopian aesthetic — its retro-futurist production design, oppressive yellow-tinged lighting, and claustrophobic framing are genuinely exceptional. Jesse Eisenberg delivers a remarkable dual performance, finding subtle but crucial distinctions between the meek Simon and the brash James. The film's voice is unmistakably singular, blending dark comedy, surrealism, and existential dread into something few films manage. The plot, while compelling in its paranoid logic, occasionally feels thin as a feature-length narrative — the Dostoevsky source material is a novella and the film sometimes struggles to fully expand it. The ending, while thematically consistent, feels slightly abrupt and undercooked, leaving the psychological resolution somewhat unsatisfying rather than deliberately ambiguous in a rewarding way.