Call ‘Enemy’ a double feature
Jake Gyllenhaal gets to stretch in dreamlike thriller
It’s a big week for doppelgangers.
Not only does Kermit the Frog have one in Muppets Most Wanted, but so does Jake Gyllenhaal in the tense, surreal thriller Enemy.
Gyllenhaal plays the rumpled Adam, a sad-sack university professor in Toronto going through the motions in a listless relationship with Mary (Mélanie Laurent). Everything about him looks drab, especially his featureless apartment. Adam and Mary scarcely interact. His morose outlook is evident in his shuffling gait and stooped posture. A chance conversation with a colleague leads him to watch a movie that his co-worker deems cheerful. Is Adam looking for something to shake him out of his funk? Or is he too woebegone? What he sees distracts him temporarily from his melancholy. Then it plunges him into terror.
As he watches the vaguely comic movie, he spots an actor in a small, background role who looks exactly like him. “Bellboy No. 3” turns out to be Anthony, Adam’s dead ringer.
Fascinated, Adam begins by tracking down Anthony, then calling him and asking to meet.
Anthony turns out to be a more confident, better-dressed guy who lives in a more luxurious but still rather sterile apartment. His pale, blond, pregnant wife, Helen (Sarah Gadon) bears a resemblance to Mary.
From there, the look-alikes — and Helen — engage in a strange series of increasingly off-putting interactions.
Enemy is a twisty, glum thriller. It’s directed by Denis Villeneuve, who made the wonderfully intriguing 2011 foreign-language Oscar nominee Incendies and last year’s Prisoners, which also starred Gyllenhaal as a cop hot on the trail of a suburban father-turned-vigilante.
Enemy offers no clear-cut answers, lending itself to several interpretations. Looming largest is whether the characters are different individuals or distinct aspects of the same person.
Gyllenhaal is excellent in the dual roles, though Laurent ( Inglourious Basterds) is given too little to do to make much of an impression. Isabella Rossellini has a brief, thankless role as the mother of at least one of the two look-alikes.
Gadon has a slightly more fleshed-out role, but the film belongs to Gyllenhaal, who embodies the meek and passionless Adam as believably as he does the arrogant, self-absorbed Anthony.
The color palette adds to a sense of low-key menace: Adam’s apartment is all bilious yellowbrowns, and shots of the city focus repeatedly on smoggy gray skies. Villeneuve seems more intent on creating a palpably gloomy atmosphere than on weaving a coherent narrative, making the experience more frustrating than riveting.
Enemy opens with a scene at a fetish club where, among other acts, a stiletto-heeled woman crushes a tarantula as dull, grayish men watch. But the story’s dour flatness keeps it from being as disturbing as it aims to be.