Enemy Has Audacity To Spare And A Top-Notch Jake Gyllenhaal Performance To Spare

Unless you're Jan de Bont or Simon Kinberg, blockbuster movie directors don't start their directorial careers helming big-budget features. Usually, they kick off their filmographies with smaller-scale tales that depart heavily in tone and genre from the blockbusters they'd eventually helm. Jon Watts, for instance, directed the small-scale thriller Cop Car before moving on to helm the MCU Spider-Man movies and Peter Jackson directed foul-mouthed horny puppets before he directed the epic fantasy movies Lord of the Rings. So it is with Denis Villeneuve, who is in the middle of directing a massively expensive adaptation of the sci-fi epic Dune, but just five years ago directed the highly unorthodox thriller Enemy.


Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a professor whose life is a pretty routine one, he goes to his job, he goes to bed, rinse, wash, repeat. But when he watches a movie on a whim one night, he discovers a background extra that beats a striking resemblance to himself. Who is this man? Some kind of twin? Eventually, Adam discovers that the man's identity is Anthony Claire (also Jake Gyllenhaal), an actor with a much more polished life consisting of a pregnant wife, Helen Claire (Sarah Gadon), and a lavish house. Now the two of them are becoming obsessed with each other's lives and Helen is being sucked into their obsession. Nothing good can come out of these two interacting so heavily. Nothing.

In the nearly six years since Enemy first debuted on the film festival circuit (it was given a domestic theatrical release in March 2014), I'm sure this has become as unique of an observation as "J.J. Abrams movies tend to frequently use lens flares", but Enemy did evoke David Lynch's Eraserhead to me. Specifically, it reminded me of that film in how it translated the internal mental plight of a man coping with the prospect of impending increasing responsibility through frequently surrealistic and unnerving storytelling that intentionally folds up logic like an especially soft napkin. Enemy is no Eraserhead, but then again what is? On its own merits, it's still a fine thriller, especially in terms of what it gives Jake Gyllenhaal to do as a lead actor.

For the first third of Enemy, we exclusively follow Adam Bell as he tries to track down answers as to who exactly his doppelganger could possibly be. Eventually, we do get to meet that individual in the form of Anthony Claire and the moment Gyllenhaal first steps on-screen as Claire, it's astonishing to see just how well he differentiates the two characters he's playing here. Up to this point, Gyllenhaal has been so convincing as the more meek and mild Adam Bell that it's astonishing to see how equally believable he is in the more assured and confident part of Anthony Claire. When alternating between the two roles, Gyllenhaal changes everything, from his cadence to his posture, to such a profound yet realistic degree (the variations between the two of them aren't super heightened like one of them has a handlebar mustache) that the two lead characters truly come to life as wholly separate people.

Gyllenhaal's done a whole lot of challenging high-quality performances in recent years, but his work in Enemy is especially remarkable and it's a testament to just how excellent he was in Nightcrawler that his pair of Enemy performances isn't the best acting he's done in the 2010s. The rest of Enemy as a movie isn't quite as good as Gyllenhaal's work in its lead roles, mostly because its brief forays into stylized imagery (much of it revolving around insects) are so unnerving and stirring that it leaves the super restrained tendencies of some parts of this frequently very grounded film feeling like they could use an extra jolt of vibrancy. Enemy is never bad or boring, it's just that it's got some really high high's to it that leave more subdued parts of its plot feeling like they could use an extra sprinkle of vibrancy.

One of those high high's in Enemy emerges in a gangbusters climactic sequence depicting what happens when the two lead characters switch places in their lives. Everything works at top capacity here from a wonderfully understated performance from Sarah Gadon to the direction of Denis Villeneuve to the editing by Matthew Hannam. Hannam's work as an editor in this scene is especially masterful as he seems to know just what opportune times to cut back and forth across these two plotlines in order to most effectively accentuate how Adam Bell and Anthony Claire are so different from one another despite being so physically similar. This brilliantly executed sequence is followed shortly up by a bold ambiguous closing shot that feels all but begging general audiences to give this sucker an F CinemaScore rating. How can you not admire a movie like Enemy with the guts to deliver an ending like that, especially when it comes accompanied by such a sublime Jake Gyllenhaal performance?