"Enemy" (2014)

A fair amount of critical judgment of director Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners seemed to regard the film as handsomely mounted but ultimately a little hollow. I think some of that criticism is misplaced, failing to accept Prisoners as an uncommonly well-made and involving mainstream thriller despite how unoriginal, and occasionally thin, it may have been. In fact, most of the criticisms aimed at Prisoners would be better pointed at Villeneuve’s follow-up feature Enemy.

Enemy has similar immediate surficial pleasures, boasting some great cinematography by Nicolas Bolduc. But where Roger Deakin’s cinematography for Prisoners was unmistakably inviting, Bolduc’s cinematography, while not without its allure, is shot through with a sickly yellow glow. The film’s outward appearances hint at something sinister but it rarely actually manifests. It remains a quiet, anxious hum just beneath the surface of the film’s story. 

This isn’t to say that Enemy’s story isn’t without its unsettling peculiarity. The film’s central premise involves meek professor Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal) discovering the existence of a man, the confident actor Anthony St. Claire (Gyllenhaal), who looks exactly like him (This after coincidentally renting one of the movies he’s all but a glorified extra in). Javier Gullón’s script keeps dancing right up to the line of explaining the reasons for their identical looks, suggesting there’s some malicious or strange explanation for it. But we never receive answers and the film slowly falls off a cliff into convoluted abstraction. 

This has been a banner year for doppelgängers, including Muppets Most Wanted and Richard Ayoade’s oddly similar sounding but superior The Double. The Double also features a man, played by Jesse Eisenberg, meeting another man who is precisely the same except for drastically different personalities. Unlike The Double though, Enemy never uses the doppelgänger angle to instill the film with any greater meaning. There’s a literary tact in The Double where the yin-yang of mirrored individuals becomes symbolic of the main character’s internal desires and frustrations. Enemy, by contrast, merely uses it for total weirdness and disappointing, one-note psychosexual nonsense. 

Enemy makes grasps for weighted meaning. Villeneuve’s shoots the film elliptically and has the film fold in on itself. The film pretentiously opens with the epigraph “Chaos is order yet undeciphered”. Early scenes feature Adam, in all too obvious thematic exposition, lecturing to his class about control and repetition (featuring casual references to the Roman Empire and Karl Marx as if it’s all so very deep), and it’s all intended to imply greater substance. The film doesn’t follow through on these themes with enough care or interest for them to feel like they matter though. 

Again as in Prisoners, Gyllenhaal gives a performance stronger than the film he’s in. Gyllenhaal imbues his characters with small gestures that make Adam and Anthony feel like two distinguished and recognizable people. Notice the way he delivers his lines as Adam, stumbling, constantly doubting; this is a man who is uncertain of every tiny thing he does. He falls over his words and chokes on his own over-heated mind. The other performers are given hardly anything to do. Melanie Laurent and Sarah Gadon star as the romantic partners of the two leads. Little is done to characterize them. They’re presences, not people. 

The film splits its storytelling modes between a straightforward thriller narrative and a trippy arthouse oddity. The further it moves along though, the more the film flows with the logic of a dream. Haunting, disturbing imagery presents itself and is then never explained. There is a reoccurring image of a tarantula; at one point it seems poised to destroy the city of Toronto, where the film is set. The gonzo final scene of the film, which I won’t reveal, is as baffling as it is unnerving. It’s hard to tell how much of what we see is actually happening (at one point, a character even asks, “What is happening?”). 

In case you couldn’t already guess where this was headed: Adam and Anthony’s live start to bleed into one another. Anthony becomes interested in taking advantage of the situation for personal gain, while Adam is reluctant. It’s hard to get invested though. Beguiling surfaces aside, Enemy is pointlessly dark and obscure and it is hard to get too committed to it. Yet it’s not elusive but evasive, failing to follow through on the story it informed us it intended to tell and only half-heartedly telling what it does at that. 

Grade: C