French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve premiered his first two English-language films in 2013. One was the blockbuster psychological thriller Prisoners. The lesser-known, Enemy, is a moody, enthralling nightmare of a movie that seems to be about a man battling with two sides of his personality. It could also be a movie about two men who happen to share a face. In either case, both are bad. One of them is a suave, motorcycle-obsessed actor with a beautiful wife and a fidelity problem — he’s part of a underground sex club where naked women kill tarantulas with their feet. The other is a moody history teacher and beta male who clearly sees himself as a good guy, but treats his girlfriend (Mélanie Laurent) like a bag of meat nonetheless.
On the bright side, both are played by Jake Gyllenhaal and he gives two of his best performances in it.
Enemy not only hates people (or men, at least), it also hates stories. Over and over, history teacher Gyllenhaal gives the same lecture about how Romans lulled people into submission by distracting them with entertainment — “the history of civilization is all about control,” he says. Later, he tells a co-worker “I don’t really like the movies.” There are moments meant to drive real-world moviegoers up the wall — like a spider the size of a skyscraper, strolling over a hazy Toronto, which is shown only once, and never referenced by a character. It’s a great movie, but it’s pretty easy to see why it never got a wide release in the US.
On the surface, Enemy doesn’t seem to share much with Villeneuve’s recent big-budget critical darling, Arrival. Arrival is an optimistic movie that picks a brainy Amy Adams as an unassuming exemplar of what is good and possible for human beings. As The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino wrote recently, its most daring fantasy is that it imagines “we’ll be around to help anyone in 3,000 years.”