Our oft-mentioned but unnamed cinephile friend claimed that this film left him flummoxed. For that alone, even if The Double weren’t already on our watch list, I would have put it there. Of course, after I’d watched it, it was my turn to be bewildered. But as my wife explained, this is a film that does most of its work on a symbolic level. While there are plenty of ambiguities over who’s real and what happened, trying to work out some sort of literal truth is a fool’s errand. What matters is understanding its themes and they mean.

The clues to this starts with its vivid depiction of a crapsack world of perpetual night, crumbling buildings, flickering fluorescents and antiquated devices. Where suicide is so common that the local police force has a team of jaded detectives dedicated to dealing with it and the only thing to watch on tv is one single mind-numbingly inane show. It seems impossible for anyone to be anything other than constantly miserable, yet Jesse Eisenberg’s Simon James seems to have it worse than everyone else.

He’s ignored, bullied and pushed around. He has worked in the same office for seven years but the security guard there never recognizes him. If he sits down in a train, someone comes along to say that he’s sitting in their place even if the rest of the carriage is empty. Whatever he orders at the diner is never available. In fact the entire universe seems to be conspiring against him since elevators mysteriously stop working when he’s alone inside one. It’s not as if he has bad luck or that he’s looked down on. It’s as if he doesn’t really exist. It a surreally immersive world and that is before things get really weird when James’ doppelgänger shows up.

I found all this wickedly humorous in a very dark way. My wife had to remind me of the horror on display here in how a person’s identity and individuality can be stripped away and rendered down to nothing. But I was too distracted by the absurdity of the situation to feel much empathy. One example of this is the way that every authority figure James sees wears the face of the same security guard who works in his office. And in spite of myself, I still couldn’t quite break free of trying to figure out how much of what we see exists only in James’ mind, like a more insidious version of the delusion in Fight Club.

One misgiving that I have is how true love is depicted as acting like a creepy stalker who surreptitiously follows the girl’s every move, uses a telescope to peep on her and rummages through her trash. It’s pretty much the same scenario that I’d pointed out only recently about The Fisher King. I also didn’t like how most of the conflict over identity is centered around who gets the girl. I haven’t read the original Dostoyevsky novel that this is based on but I’m reasonably certain that it wasn’t the case there.

In the end, this is a film that I admire and that I recommend for how visually striking and unique it is. But it isn’t really a film that I actually like. It works more on a metaphorical level than I usually prefer and I feel that the humor is at odds with the very serious and dark tone of what it is trying it say.