To call Richard Ayoade's new movie The Double a future cult classic feels like damning it to be ignored. But like Terry Gilliam's Brazil and David Lynch's Eraserhead, with which it would share a theoretical Netflix microgenre ("Surreal Black Comedies Set In Ridiculously Bleak Urban Landscapes"), The Double is the kind of film you imagine people are going to continue to happily discover over the years.

The dark fable, which opens in theaters in New York and Los Angeles this Friday and in more cities in the following weeks, centers on a man so forgettable that when a new employee who's physically identical to him arrives at his workplace, no one notices the resemblance. Starring Jesse Eisenberg as both Simon James and James Simon and Mia Wasikowska as Simon's co-worker and crush Hannah, The Double is as grim as it is dryly clever, a social anxiety nightmare in which a doppelgänger shows up to prove how much more popular and successful you could be if you just weren't so... you.

The Double is based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 19th-century novella of the same name, though Ayoade and his co-writer Avi Korine (brother of Harmony of Spring Breakers notoriety) have taken the tale in a different direction after the introduction of the mysterious doppelgänger, from "schizophrenic descent" into an exploration of loneliness and invisibility. "The thing that we liked about the story is that the two look identical, but everyone for some reason just likes the other one," Ayoade explains. "They always would pick the other one. If they both told a joke, they would laugh at the other one even if they said it in exactly the same way. That was part of the nightmarish aspect of it — there's no reason. His manifestation is about Simon's state."

Landing a big, crowd-pleasing punchline doesn't seem like a pressing concern for Ayoade, for whom cult classics have been something of a specialty. The London-born, Cambridge-educated writer, director, actor, and comedian was one of the forces behind Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, a terrific and terrifically strange British horror comedy series that pretended to be a never-broadcast '80s show finally being aired and intercut with present-day interviews with the cast members. The single six-episode 2004 season built up a devoted following online (and it can be and absolutely should be watched on Hulu).

Ayoade was also part of the original cast of the TV incarnation of The Mighty Boosh, though he ended up turning his role over to Darkplace co-star Matt Berry after the pilot, returning to play shaman/DJ Saboo in later seasons. His best-known role in front of the camera to date, however, has been in The IT Crowd, a British sitcom created by Father Ted's Graham Linehan about the basement-dwelling IT team of an otherwise slick London corporation. Ayoade played the cheerily awkward Maurice Moss opposite Chris O'Dowd's more easygoing but just as geeky Roy Trenneman on the series, which aired in the U.S. on IFC and is currently streaming on Netflix).