Ene­my

It’s tough to recall the last time a bonafide, lantern-jawed A‑list movie star decid­ed, for one night only, to point­ed­ly for­sake the Brown Der­by set of Tin­sel­town, LA, to star in an hon­est-to-good­ness erot­ic art-house brain­teas­er which flaunts its lim­it­ed appeal like a pair of over­sized bronze testicles.

Jake Gyl­len­haal and Jake Gyl­len­haal play tac­i­turn dop­pel­gängers with wild chin fuzz who while away their mediocre, beige-hued exis­tences in a Toron­to sub­urb work­ing as a his­to­ry lec­tur­er and bit-part film actor respec­tive­ly. The for­mer hap­pens upon a crud­dy DVD com­e­dy in which he sees a back­ground char­ac­ter played by the lat­ter. The film then charts the pair’s efforts to meet and then com­pre­hend one another’s exis­tence, with ini­tial bewil­der­ment swift­ly evolv­ing into anger, and then into an oppor­tu­ni­ty for some devi­ous no-strings sex.

French-Cana­di­an direc­tor Denis Vil­leneuve made this film as a wacko exper­i­ment with Gyl­len­haal and his DoP Nico­las Bolduc, and its sto­ry is ripped from the pages of the 2002 nov­el, ​‘The Dou­ble’, by Por­tuguese author, José Sara­m­a­go. As a direc­tor and an arch screen styl­ist able to infer off-screen hor­rors, Vil­leneuve appears as an acolyte to Davids Lynch and Fincher.

The sin­u­ous glid­ing move­ments of his cam­era work-up a pal­pa­ble sense of unease, as does the unnerv­ing fusion of sound (here, aton­al per­cus­sive jazz) and image. Enemy’s most remark­able moments are the omi­nous shots of neu­tral scenery that sit as mark­ers between human inter­ac­tions – he man­ages to infer an all-encom­pass­ing evil lurk­ing behind the pris­tine white build­ings which clog the fog­gy skyline.

There’s a bold­ness to the sto­ry­telling and a gut­sy sup­pres­sion of detail and expla­na­tion, but the prob­lem with Ene­my is that its sub­tle manip­u­la­tions feel all-too self-con­scious. The film doesn’t con­vince that what it’s about would amount to any­thing more than drunk­en psy­chob­a­b­ble, with char­ac­ter moti­va­tions get­ting hazier as the run­time ticks on. If, as is the case with most dop­pel­gänger movies, these char­ac­ters are rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the oppos­ing sides of a sin­gle per­son­al­i­ty, then the film could, at best, be accept­ed as an osten­ta­tious stab at a hack­neyed premise.

If the ambi­tion is broad­er, and this in fact a sci­ence-fic­tion-laced explo­ration of life under some kind of mis­cel­la­neous total­i­tar­i­an dic­ta­tor­ship and the homogeni­sa­tion of mankind, then you’d be forced to con­cede that the film fails to ignite that par­tic­u­lar polit­i­cal pow­der-keg. You could almost accuse Ene­my of being over­ly guard­ed about its true nature, and that its unwill­ing­ness to stow its strange nar­ra­tive with­in more plain-speak­ing con­tex­tu­al trap­pings becomes its own undoing.

Sor­ry to talk in such broad-stroke gen­er­al­i­ties, but the fine pro­duc­tion tics and freeform plot twists are the film’s pri­ma­ry plea­sures (for max­i­mum enjoy­ment, don’t read any reviews). In short, if Pris­on­ers was Gyllenhaal’s Dri­ve, then Ene­my is his Only God For­gives. This is an exer­cise in unal­loyed, idio­syn­crat­ic style which is unwor­ried about whether an audi­ence might be moved to peer through the smoke and mirrors.