Before Denis Villeneuve became a household name synonymous with sweeping science fiction blockbusters—the man who would bring Arrival, Blade Runner 2049,, and Dune to multiplexes with both critical acclaim and commercial success—he had already established a formidable career in his native Canada. Yet the films that built that reputation belonged to genres that, at least in terms of commercial designation, could hardly be more distant from the grand-scale sci-fi spectacles that would later define him. A good example can be found in Enemy, a 2013 arthouse drama that is sometimes described, perhaps too narrowly, as a psychological thriller.
The film is based on The Double, a 2002 novel by Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago. The script, by Spanish writer Javier Gullón, transplants the plot from Saramago's unnamed Iberian setting to Toronto, a city whose glass-and-concrete modernism provides a suitably disorienting backdrop for the story's existential unease.
The protagonist, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is Adam Bell, a mild-mannered professor teaching history at a college. He lives a quiet, almost oppressively unremarkable life, his only meaningful human connection being a casual sexual relationship with a woman named Mary, played by Mélanie Laurent. One day, a colleague named Carl, played by Joshua Pearce, recommends a comedy film titled Where There's a Will There's a Way. Adam watches the film and is startled to discover that the actor playing a small role as a bellhop looks exactly like him.
Unaware of having any twin brother, Adam begins researching the film and its cast, ultimately discovering that the actor's real name is Anthony Claire, also played by Gyllenhaal. Anthony lives with his wife Helen, played by Sarah Gadon, who is six months pregnant. Adam's attempts to reach Anthony initially lead to all manner of misunderstandings. Anthony believes he is dealing with a stalker, whilst Helen, having been previously cheated on by Anthony, assumes the man calling their apartment is a jealous husband. She decides to confront Adam but finds that he looks exactly like her husband, though she is baffled when he treats her like a stranger. After an awkward meeting with Adam in a hotel room, Anthony begins to stalk him, discovers Mary, and—impersonating Adam—has sex with her. Meanwhile, Adam decides to investigate Anthony's apartment, but is caught by Helen and begins to impersonate her husband.
Made as an international co-production between Canada, Spain, and France, Enemy was produced shortly after Villeneuve had completed Prisoners, a more conventional but very successful thriller that also starred Gyllenhaal and which would ultimately serve as Villeneuve's ticket to Hollywood. Enemy is a very different beast, firmly anchored in the realm of arthouse cinema, having its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival rather than being positioned for mainstream theatrical success.
Enemy generally received good critical reviews, though they were not unanimous in their praise. This split in opinion might be explained by Villeneuve's obvious talent for direction—a talent evident in nearly every frame—which in this case proves insufficient to compensate for some serious conceptual and creative flaws in the script.
There is no denying that Enemy is nice to look at. Nicolas Bolduc's cinematography puts the impressive architecture and vistas of modern Toronto to excellent use, rendering the city's clean lines and geometric facades as a kind of psychological maze that mirrors the protagonist's fracturing sense of self. Mélanie Laurent and Sarah Gadon—the latter arguably one of the most beautiful Canadian actresses of her generation—are easy on the eyes, an effect only enhanced by the number of scenes in which they appear nude.
Yet all this effort is undermined by a script that has deliberately decided to make the plot as confusing as possible. The film opens with a visually impressive prologue set in an underground sex club where nude women crush insects, including a huge tarantula. The scene makes little sense and bears no clear connection with the rest of the film, including an equally baffling ending that has become the subject of endless online discussion. The film has been the subject of plenty of debates and wildly differing interpretations—between those who take the plot as a conventional story about doppelgängers, and those who believe that Adam and Anthony are in fact the same man suffering from a split personality. Neither reading is entirely satisfying, and the film's refusal to commit to either feels less like deliberate ambiguity and more like a screenwriter hiding behind opacity in lieu of genuine depth.
A further issue is the soundtrack by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, which was presumably intended to make the film atmospheric and fill the audience with a sense of dread. In the end, however, it sounds repetitive, pretentious, and frankly annoying—a droning, overbearing presence that telegraphs unease so aggressively that it becomes counterproductive. Even the relatively short running time of ninety minutes will prove challenging for many in the audience, who may find themselves checking their watches long before the film's enigmatic final shot arrives.
In retrospect, Enemy stands as an interesting curio in Villeneuve's filmography—a film that showcases his visual sensibilities and his ability to coax strong performances from his cast, but which is ultimately hobbled by a script that mistakes obscurity for profundity. Where Prisoners, its immediate predecessor, demonstrated Villeneuve's capacity to elevate a genre exercise into something genuinely gripping, Enemy demonstrates the opposite: that even considerable directorial talent cannot salvage material that is fundamentally more interested in puzzling its audience than engaging it.
RATING: 3/10 (+)
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