Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Mélanie Laurent, Sarah Gadon
History professor Adam Bell (Gyllenhaal) leads a pretty
unextraordinary life between his teaching and his relationship with his
girlfriend, Mary (Laurent) living in a sparse Ontario apartment. One day, by
recommendation, he rents a movie and comes to discover that one of the extras
is his exact double. Andy tracks down his doppelgänger and a game of trading
lives begins.
Enemy is an
adaptation of the book The Double by Jose Saramago, but also bears striking
similarities with Dostoyevsky’s story of the same name which was adapted into a
film by Richard Ayoade around the same time as this film, so the two make
obvious companion pieces but still exist entirely on their own stylistic idiosyncrasies.
If Ayoade’s The Double lends itself to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) with its
ramshackle anachronistic futurism and mad comic energy, Enemy is more akin to
the works of David Cronenberg. The Ontario setting both gleaming with
futuristic glamour yet somehow still mired in pollution and grime and odd
stylistic flourishes that definitely recall Cronenberg’s work (the credit
typeface is reminiscent of Shivers (1975) and the strange dreamlike rendering
of the film-within-a-film mildly recalls Videodrome (1983)) but director Denis
Villeneuve isn’t simply a copycat and what he presents has moments of
fascination.
The film is dominated in many ways by the aesthetics. We are
presented with two central characters in Adam and Anthony, both played by Jake
Gyllenhaal, and their lives are represented by their surroundings. Adam’s world
lurches between being in turns spartan and ugly with its dated and harsh
architecture and the screen constantly being bathed in a polluted and faded
yellow tone. He drives a dilapidated car and he seems to live a very empty
life. Anthony, an actor, leads a more glamorous life with a clean, almost clinical,
home-life and rides around on a motorbike but is really the less sympathetic of
the two, though neither are great people.
Jake Gyllenhaal really stands out in his duel roles. With
last year’s film Nightcrawler winning him a great deal of critical recognition,
Gyllenhaal’s history of playing troubled characters has morphed into him
becoming the go-to guy for the unstable
as both of his roles here are as men who are sane, but seem on the verge of a
breakdown, bringing about an intensity to Gyllenhaal’s performances.
The film also seems to excel when it plays with its more
surrealistic qualities. The premise is already rather surreal but there are
additional layers on top of it that give the film an often quiet nightmarish
quality whilst some sequences such as a sleeping recollection of a movie early
on in the film are very memorable. However, there are drawbacks especially in
the seemingly-inevitable issue when you play around with the notion of the doppelgänger
that there’s a tendency to get characters confused. Enemy averts this more than might be
expected but it can be an issue and the film demands rapt attention because of
that.
Enemy is not a lightweight film with its oppressive setting
and dank and depressing atmosphere as well as the sleaze and corruption in the
society in which the film seems to be set. It’s also not lightweight because of
its principal premise. This is a film that wants you to think and even though
it isn’t the hardest film to get your head around it demands an audience watch
and try and watch the mystery unravel even if their role is really pretty
passive. It’s an interesting film but not one of those mysteries that warrant
further exploration.
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