The Double

Richard Ayoade's The Double, based loosely on Dostoevsky's novel of the same name, unfolds in a world that feels equal parts Kafka and Orwell, a bureaucratic nightmare rendered in sickly yellow fluorescents and impossible architecture. The tone is oppressively dark, deliberately nonsensical; this is a universe where logic has left the building, where every interaction carries the threat of absurdist cruelty. The film takes Dostoevsky's central question and makes it visceral: we all maintain multiple identities, slipping between our work self, our social self, our private self with practiced…