Enemy

⭐ 7.5/10

This was a bit of a slow burn, but by the end of it my mind was racing. It's a pretty simple premise, a guy gets obsessed with finding an actor that looks identical to him, and when they finally meet they are actually identical. His life is already unravelling, but once they actually meet things accelerate and get very weird. It's a hard movie to describe, or even to understand.

I'll start by saying its cool seeing movies filmed in places that look familiar, here its Toronto and Mississauga. But he throws this hazy tint on everything, and its impossible not to see Blade Runner 2049 or Dune, Villeneuve's later movies. The only thing I could think of the whole movie was David Lynch, and the feeling of watching someone's nightmare. And then at some point Isabella Rossellini shows up for a single scene, one of Lynch's former partners and muses, so the Lynch thing seems intentional. There are confusing setups that don't come back until the end, odd references that later connect in ways I don't really understand. Confusing doesn't make it great art, but it at least makes it something that sticks in your head long after watching it.

My theory throughout is that these guys must be the actual same person, and he is going through a psychotic break, and the rest of my theories would stem from that. With Nolan on the brain that had me thinking of Memento, a movie I love, and the idea that this movie might not be totally linear. It's fun making theories and having them change the more you think about a movie. In particular there is this spider thing that shows up like 3 times in the movie, and I still really don't know what it means. I think its a fine line between being some pretentious artist trying to give things meaning and those things actually being meaningful, and I think Denis walks that line here. But like Lynch I'm still searching for that meaning.

The score isn't super high mainly for rewatchability, in that the movie isn't propulsive or dynamic or funny enough to illicit many of the feelings I want when watching a movie. But I thought Gyllenhaal was great, and I love seeing pieces of work to come in early movies from people I like. It's interesting that this movie came out the same year as Prisoners, which is completely different and a more conventional movie, but retains the dread. Prisoners sticks in my head for its bleakness, but I think this one will have more of a lasting impact because of how much I've needed to unpack it. Next up, Incendies!