Enemy
Directed by:
Denis VilleneuveScreenplay:
Javier GullónCinematography:
Nicolas BolducCast:
Jake Gyllenhaal, Mélanie Laurent, Sarah Gadon, Isabella Rossellini, Joshua Peace, Tim Post, Kedar Brown, Stephen R. Hart, Jane Moffat, Paul StephenVOD (4)
Plots(1)
Jake Gyllenhaal reteams with his PRISONERS director, Denis Villeneuve, in this sexy and hypnotically surreal psychological thriller that breathes new life into the doppleganger tradition. Adam Bell (Gyllenhaal) is a glum, disheveled history professor, who seems disinterested even his beautiful girlfriend, Mary (Laurent). Watching a movie on the recommendation of a colleague, Adam spots his double, a bit-part actor named Anthony Clair, and decides to track him down. The identical men meet and their lives become bizarrely and irrevocably intertwined. Gyllenhaal is transfixing as both Adam and Anthony, provoking empathy as well as disapproval while embodying two distinct personas. With masterfully controlled attention to detail, Villeneuve takes us on an enigmatic and gripping journey through a world that is both familiar and strange — and hard to shake off long after its final, unnerving image. (A24)
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Reviews (8)
I felt downright disappointed immediately after the screening. Unlike other films with unsatisfactory and unclear endings, Enemy woke in me a desire to know what is really hiding in the back. And the more I think back about it, the better I find it. In any case, it’s been long since a film messed with my head so much.
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Enemy put me in a mental trance that only Shutter Island, Femme Fatale and the best David Lynch movies have ever given me. This captivating and chilling vision from another world hit me right in the heart. Thank you, Mr. Villeneuve.
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Maybe there is a rational explanation, maybe there isn't, and maybe it doesn't matter either way. Mindfuck as hell, with excellent atmosphere, ultra-brutally sumptuous music, two beautiful women, and one rude spider who shrouds its fate in the story with a solidly strong thread of mystery and maybe even LSD. Gyllenhaal plays his part, but the biggest star is surely Villeneuve, who can compose his shots into an impressively compelling and symbolic tapestry like no other contemporary director. Enemy shows the power of film as a mental medium, capable of attacking the inner drives of our mostly passive minds, even at the cost of a weaker surface experience, which is also almost 100% in Lynch's Lost Highway, for example.
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A formally captivating film with brutal yellow camera filter, lots of industrial shots, a properly suffocating atmosphere and ambient music: psychedelic like crazy, or Villeneuve showing what his greatest asset is. I understood the content, but not the spider metaphors escaped me. The attempt to be the second Lynch seems unnecessary to me; I actually liked the more classical Prisoners more, where the director played similarly with the camera, the dark atmosphere, and amazingly stylized music, but it was more emotional, less of a mindfuck, and got under my skin very well.
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An intimate, also very abstract movie told in hints. Villeneuve is doing what he does well and leads the viewer through an industrial city to a room where somebody is taking a bath in the dark. The door opens, he takes you inside and then disappears, leaving you there with all your questions and fears... time to die? Gyllenhaal 1 awesome, Gyllenhaal 2 a real swine. Chaos is order yet undeciphered.
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