Face to face with double trouble
T he whole thing feels lacquered beneath a layer of nicotine. Dirty, yellow and latently sinful, Enemy creeps up on you like a puff of smoke that leaves you dizzy, and just a little out of sorts.
It’s an unsettling sensation, but it means director Denis Villeneuve nailed the narrative plot points slithering beneath the surface in this taut little thriller shot in nondescript Toronto.
Based on Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago’s novel and starring hunk Jake Gyllenhaal, Enemy pushes the envelope of personal identity when it forces us to confront a potentially existential situation: What if another human being on the planet looked exactly like us?
Not only would self-affirming notions of uniqueness vanish in an instant, we’d have to take a second look at the very foundation of personal ego and put a big question mark beside it — which is exactly what happens to our central character when he stumbles into his doppelgänger while watching TV.
When we first meet Adam (Gyllenhaal), he seems comfortable in his ashen Eden of an apartment building, grading university papers and having uninspired sex with his girlfriend — but something is missing.
He has no idea what it could be, but when he sees Anthony — a two-bit actor who looks just like him — he’s determined to dig into the mystery.
But the deeper Adam digs, the deeper he falls into a hole he created, which makes him panic, and dig even more.
We can tell the cycle is going to spiral downward, almost from the start, because Villeneuve keeps blowing that fetid yellow smoke in our face. He even seems to offer a nod to David Cronenberg’s seminal Shivers every time he shows us a shot of Mississauga, Ont.’s sterile skyline — where human forms are flattened and packaged into boxed habitats.
This is a place where people occupy shelf space like product and find personal identity through corporate brands, cars, clothes and cosmetically appetizing sexual encounters.
Adam sees the emptiness of it all, so he strays from his Eden for a little excitement — but once you leave the garden, there’s no going back.
In fact, Adam is completely lost, which brings humour into this mix of emotional solvents and psychological sparks, turning Enemy into a ticking time bomb as we wait for the chemical reaction to unfold.
Gyllenhaal’s two flasks of character feel different enough to instil tension.
Part of us wants to see the chemicals mix to see what happens, but another part fears the potential explosion and its unknowable devastation.
But Gyllenhaal masters the Jekyll and Hyde side of the job by finding the right dynamic with his foil.