The camera tracks left over a muddied yellow cityscape while composers Bensi and Jurrinan’s eerie and foreboding score plays; discordant strings turn into synth-like drones that get under the skin. A beep emerges; the voicemail message accompanying it feels less intrusion and more accompaniment to the score – the soundscape is unified in its discordant elements. A woman’s voice (Isabella Rossellini) can be heard. She talks to her son and thanks him for showing him her new apartment. She mentions concern over his living conditions and asks for him to call back while the camera cuts to Adam (Jake Gyllenhaal), her son, sitting in a musty car. His eyes reflected in the car’s rear-view mirror show an inertia – he looks unenthused and out of it. The mother’s words gain some power as her son’s disposition indicates a lack of vitality.

She tells him she loves him and the film cuts to a pregnant woman, Helen, who sits basked in a yellow haze of light and shadow. Another mother in response to the son. A pattern established, but what does it mean? The screen turns black as if in response and the following words appear on the screen in yellow font: “”Chaos is order yet undeciphered.” This is Enemy’s calling card; the story is a puzzle that entices the viewer to engage in dialogue. Patterns are present and meanings are given but their connections aren’t immediately apparent. Thus, order is only present for those willing to decipher – a great way to prime the viewer to not only pay attention but to stay invested to even the most minor of details.

The words fade into a black background out which a pair of hands appear in close view. We cut to a wider shot and see a man who looks like Adam but exudes a more confident presence along with another man walking down a dimly lit hallway where the yellow lights emit a sickly feeling in the area. This “potential” Adam^[1]I use potential in quotes here because the nature of which character this is isn’t made definite and is certainly meant to be presented as up for interpretation at the start. For my full … Continue reading opens the door and enters the room as the unnerving score gets more intrusive and for good reason. It turns out that the characters have entered a dimly lit room filled with smoke and mirrors where hordes of men gather around women performing sexual acts. This mise-en-scène gives the setting a surreal feeling – the perverse room feels apart from a “normal” world. The women’s moans and squeals of enjoyment accentuate the unease generated by the score – the sounds of ecstasy take on the sign of omen as they become infected by the score.

Suddenly, two women adorned in a silky robes and long heels comes out and the crowd’s attention becomes focused. Their initial “holy” appearance, at least comparatively, and the way they command the energy of the room evokes the feeling of sacred ritual – the climax approaches. One of the women carries a covered tray which she places in the center of the room. Meanwhile the other one disrobes in the background as the “potential” Adam places his fingers over his face, almost as if trying to cover it, and leaves room only for his eyes to peer through – four fingers on each side of his face wrapping around from the bottom-up. The tray is picked up and a spider walks out from the center of it. However, as it tries to get away, it’s followed by the now fully disrobed women who follows it around the table. Her pursuit is shown via the reflection of the table – a mirror image.

Eventually she corners and stands menacingly over the creature, revealed only by her silhouette. She places her robe over the spider as if about to crush the creature while the room watches with baited breath. Is this what the men came to see? A nude woman threatening to kill a spider? A leg positioned over a creature possessing 8 legs? We cut back to the “potential” Adam in the same position as before. Now the 8 fingers reaching around his face form part of an inverted image: a spider made of hands reaching around the face in contrast to the feet reaching to the spider proper.

We see a view of the city again before the film cuts to Adam teaching a college classroom. He starts his lecture on control by stating that: “Every dictatorship has one obsession. And that’s it. So, in Ancient Rome, they gave the people bread and circuses. They kept the populace busy with entertainment, but other dictatorships use other strategies to control ideas. How do they do that? Lower education. They limit culture. Censor information. They censor any means of individual expression. And it’s important to remember this, that this is a pattern that repeats itself throughout history. ” He finishes his lecture and the students leave.

He gets on a bus that traverses the city via cable transport that travels along lines that extend from building to building like a web of control. The spider’s influence is everywhere it seems. Adam gets into his disheveled looking apartment where he exists in lethargic state. His dissatisfaction is apparent as he expresses frustration in the movement of his hands while grading his students’ papers. He brings his hands up to his face as if to pray right as his girlfriend, Mary (Mélanie Laurent), shows up. She attempts to converse with him, but he refuses to answer. Instead, he focuses on just engaging in sex with her.

Then, the pattern repeats. He’s back in his classroom, giving the same lecture as above, gets on the web-linked train, grades papers at home, has sex with Mary and back to it again. He’s stuck in a loop that leaves him out of joint. Finally, the pattern breaks. As Adam sits in the teacher’s lounge, one of his co-workers asks him whether or not he goes to the movies and if he’s a “movie guy”. Adam indicates he doesn’t go out a lot and doesn’t like movies. This would also make sense given his lecture content – entertainment is a strategy used to control people so he stays away from it.

His coworker persists and mentions that one can watch a movie at home and that renting can work just as good as going out theatres. In response to this persistence, Adam requests a recommendation for something cheerful to which his coworker recommends Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way” The odd title initially strikes both us and Adam as a philosophical statement until he clarifies the flick is a local film which Adam should check out. Thus, the initial pattern is disrupted. A desire has presented itself within the inert world of Adam’s.

He comes back home after having rented the movie. As he dejectedly rests his head against his right palm, Mary appears and tries to coax him into coming to bed with her even mentioning how “drunk” she is. She plays with his face and tries to awaken something sensual in him but he’s unmoved. In one fluid movement, the camera tracks horizontally Mary as she leaves Adam alone, receding into the darkness and leaving the light on him. He finishes the last paper and opens up his laptop to start and finish the movie. Once again, the camera moves horizontally, demonstrating the passing of time and location. The movie is done and Mary is fast asleep. Adam gets up and looks perturbed, but tries to distract himself by having sex with sleeping Mary. He gets on top of her, but the time is passed and she’s no longer interested. She asks him to stop, gets out of bed, and changes. He asks what’s wrong and she lets him know she’ll call tomorrow. The pattern has now fully broken down and with it comes the first signs of horror.

The score becomes intimidating as it starts to pound as pattern of the film fully breaks down – now the screen has transported the viewer to within the Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way. This is Adam’s’ dream and his unconscious, now stirred out of the monotony of his “everyday”, presents the dream to move Adam.

A woman in a red dress and black hat stands at a hotel’s reception and is received by two staff without hats. One of the men calls a bell boy with a red hat to help the woman with her two bags. He retrieves two bags from the floor and follows the woman along. As the two walk, a group of men and women sitting close-by stare at the black-hatted woman. A woman wearing a yellow hat courting a man wearing a red-tie with a spider-web pattern on it is terrified at the presence of this woman in the black hat who continues to walk along. The bell boy and woman then run into another man with a hat, who takes his hat off, and then proceeds to talk with the woman. It’s at this point that bell boy’s face is finally revealed and the visage looks exactly like Adam sans a beard. The dream breaks – the realization has been made.

Adam wakes up in dread and slowly walks out of his bedroom to see his laptop, still on, waiting in his chair as if taunting him to peer closer. He picks up the computer and starts to fast forward, pause, and scan Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way for the disturbance he saw in his dream – the presence of his doppelgänger.

Fittingly, upon finding his “repetition”, he begins his next lecture on something new – Hegel. Adam explains that Hegel claimed that “the greatest world events happen twice” and then Karl Marx added that “the first time it was tragedy, and the second time it was a farce.” Taken together, the statements mean that the repetition of an original event, confirms it not merely as contingency but as necessary. In other words, it’s the instantiation of a pattern – chaos which becomes ordered through a repetition which confirms a “truth” established previously. If this is the case, then what patterns does Adam’s movie actor doppelgänger reveal about his patterns – his “truth”? Adam becomes obsessed with finding out precisely that and thus, Enemy can proceed with gusto.

With its doppelgänger set-up, surrealistic set-pieces, and expressed interest in acting as a puzzle to the viewer, it’s no surprise that Enemy falls in a line of films that includes the likes of: Persona, Fight Club, Lost Highway. Like these films, Enemy employs a dream-like logic in its construction to guide the viewer through a matrix of desire and fantasy in such fashion as to engender a desire in the viewer to delve deeper. For all the answers director Denis Villeneuve withholds, he never leaves the viewer feeling frustrated that only “nonsense” is occurring.

He does this by both employing segments of the film absent of Adam and his duplicate to help establish baselines that the audience can use to decipher what can or cannot be the case and also by priming the audience to pay attention to patterns, some easily discernible and others more hidden. Thus, Enemy becomes whatever the audience makes of it – it’s a game that constantly plays back giving the film and enigmatic pulse that gnaws at the viewers curiosity. There’s always another movement, another scene, another pattern waiting to be found to make sense of what came before. Consequently, the mysteries of the film feel solid enough to grasp, so the viewer can traverse strands of Enemy’s web even if they can’t see the web in its entirety.

Because Villeneuve meticulously stages the film in parallel movements, both within scenes and between them, there’s always a constant series of moving answers and questions. As new patterns are formed, new questions can be raised which opens previous and future scenes up to more nuanced interpretations. This is all purposeful, as evidenced by a scene that occurs midway in the film that quite literally represents a particular breakpoint in the film – it’s proof of the intention driving every one of the film’s decisions. Even if one can’t immediately notice each point and it’s counterpoint, it’s doppelgänger so to speak, they can certainly feel it in the structure of the film which reinforces and builds upon symbols and feelings at a subconscious level, priming the audience one way or another.

In particular, this parallel movement sets the viewer up for moments of genuine psychological fear. Patterns induce a level of comfort and the disruption of those patterns creates a level of anxiety. As evidenced by the intrusion of the film within the film, the seemingly random interruption of a “normal occurrence” jolts ones senses. Because the film clues the viewer to notice the patterns, the moments of deviations, the farces to come, are horrific.

Furthermore, the constant presence of the spider and its web in the mise-en-scène evokes the unease of the opening scene of sexual violence while creating webs of meaning between groupings of ideas. The music that accompanies it stays a constant force throughout the film, punctuating every moment with its anxiety inducing drone. There’s never a moment of respite as the senses are assaulted with an impending sense that something obscene is happening. In particular, Villenevue’s dedication to the sickly yellow lighting and color choice accentuates the feeling of misery the characters seem to be experiencing. The color lets the shadows of the dark “shine” through against the yellow, letting the feeling of the unknown pervade in moments of unease. The result is a psychological horror that uses its surrealistic base not just as a method of presenting unnerving images but as a method of probing the viewer’s unconsciousness to pick up on the undercurrents of terror lying just beneath the veneer of the apparent narrative. It’s precisely because of this that the ending of the film hits as hard and shocks as much as it does. It’s a finale that fully crystallizes the tensions and sense of unease that the film spends most of its run-time building, simultaneously tying the strands of the film together while disorienting the viewer.

At the heart of this disorienting feeling is Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays both Adam and his double within the film. Both characters occupy almost every scene, and their intermingling journey serves as the source of the narrative’s momentum. Having one actor play two characters is hard enough, but Villenevue’s story requires that the duo be similar enough to provoke the feeling of unease at the idea of a duplicate, but at the same time be different enough so that the viewer is easily able to identify which character is present in which scene. Jarring cuts which feature jumps between the characters would be wholly incomprehensible if not for Gyllenhaal’s ability to push the smallest subtleties in the characters’ dispositions to help the audience keep track of what storyline is headed in which direction. The genius of the performance lies not in just the distinctions, but the manner in which those performances give birth to even more performances – acts within acts as the two selves vie for control of the situation. Gyllenhaal has to walk a tight rope to let the nuances of Enemy settle and disturb and because he does so, in what I think is his career best performance, he lets the movie rise to its potential.

Currently, Enemy sports the lowest audience and critic scores on both Rotten Tomatoes ^[2]Denis Villeneuve. Rotten Tomatoes. (n.d.). Retrieved September 25, 2021, from https://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/denis-villeneuve. and Metacritic ^[3] Denis Villeneuve. Metacritic. (n.d.). Retrieved September 25, 2021, from https://www.metacritic.com/person/denis-villeneuve.. This makes sense when comparing the film to his most popular outputs, Arrival and Sicario, which both feature energetic narratives where there’s a constant sense of propulsion driving everything towards a certain point. Enemy is very much the opposite, choosing instead to assault the audience with patterns whose boundaries bleed into and out of one another. Instead of presenting a straight-forward journey, Enemy presents a closed loop circling around a mystery it beckons the audience towards solving. For those viewers that prefer fully comprehensive narratives that need less discernment on their part, Villenevue’s surreal adventure might prove to be too frustrating an experience to find satisfaction in. However, those viewers looking for a cerebral experience should accept Enemy’s invitation to find order in chaos and take the plunge into the spider’s web of meaning.

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