There’s more than a hint of Richard Ayoade in Craig Roberts’s darkly comic directorial debut. Both the teen awkwardness of Submarine (in which Roberts memorably starred) and the Dostoevskian paranoia of The Double are here present and correct. Working from his own script, Roberts plays the titular Jim, a dorky misfit whose life is transformed by the arrival of new neighbour Dean (Emile Hirsch), who teaches Jim to be a rebel. Trips to a rat-pit cinema endlessly repeating the same mock-noir hint that Dean may be partly a Fight Club-style figment of Jim’s cineliterate imagination, although the film’s surreal threads are left deliberately open-ended. With his deadpan Keaton-esque demeanour, Roberts is already a singular screen presence, and here acquits himself confidently behind the camera, handling the film’s shifting tones with nicely cracked off-kilter humour.
