Jake Gyllenhaal is a good actor even if he isn’t necessarily someone I would go out of my way to see, even though I usually enjoy what he’s in. Denis Villeneuve is a director whose work I am quickly becoming a huge fan of, enough that I will gladly go see his upcoming Dune despite the fact that novel bored me to tears. Beyond the fact these two guys have names whose spelling I need to double-check before I type them out, they also made a movie together.
That was 2013’s Enemy, and man, does it fit into Villeneuve’s general oevre.
After a strange opening in which a man (Gyllenhaal) goes to an exotic sex club where a lot of rather bored-looking men watch people copulate and a large spider is served on a platter of some kind, we meet Adam Bell, a rather mediocre man. He’s a college history professor with a small class and a so-so presentation style. Afterward, he goes home, has what looks like rote sex with his girlfriend Mary (Mélanie Laurent), and then his day more or less repeats right down to the same lecture in the classroom to bored students who don’t even seem to be paying attention to him anyway. Bread and circuses indeed.
Then a colleague asks Adam if he goes to the movies because there’s this actor who looks an awful lot like him. Intrigued, Adam looks into the man, Anthony Chase, and discovers Anthony (also Gyllenhaal) does indeed look a lot like him. Adam manages to track Anthony down, speaking by phone to Anthony’s pregnant wife Helen (Sarah Gadon), and she thinks it’s her husband playing a trick. When the two finally do meet, the resemblance is more than minor. The two share a birthday, scars, and other similarities. Adam is scared off by this while Anthony is intrigued. We’ve seen enough of Anthony (it was him at the sex club, obviously) to know he isn’t the most moral or upstanding of men even if materially he’s been more successful than Adam. While Adam won’t go much futher than to ask his mother (Isabella Rossellini) if he’s an only child, Anthony will not rest.
And then the two start sharing dreams involving large spiders.
This was a quiet movie in many ways, going more for the psychological impact of such a discovery over everything else. Indeed, no explanation is ever given for why these two identical men exist. Are they different facets of the same man? Is it all in Adam/Anthony’s head? Is it just some weird thing that happened? The audience is never told, and in all likelihood, it doesn’t even matter. What matters instead is how this discovery weighs on the minds of both men. Adam finds it terrifying. Anthony sees a way to get away from a life he’s largely ignoring anyway. If the two are actually the same man, the title of the movie would seem to suggest that he’s his own enemy. That makes a lot of sense.
What would anyone do if they discovered that there was an exact double of themselves out there? We’ve seen Disney answer that question with various Parent Trap movies, but Villeneuve goes a different route, and we’re better for it. Sure, we may all find ourselves stuck in a spider’s web of some kind, but ultimately, we may all have to face that other person in the mirror, and we may not always like what we see.
Grade: A-
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