You can usually count on Jake Gyllenhaal for a magnetically odd performance: before Nightcrawler it was Prisoners, last year’s collaboration with Canadian director Denis Villeneuve. By comparison, in Villeneuve’s Enemy Gyllenhaal is altogether reasonable – compelling, though, and you get two Jakes for the price of one. Counterintuitively representing an island of understatement in an altogether barmy film, Gyllenhaal plays a timid academic who discovers that he has an exact double, a failed movie actor, and makes the mistake of contacting him.
Based – with considerable modifications, by all accounts – on José Saramago’s novel The Double, Enemy is set in an otherworldly version of Toronto and laced with menacing arachnid imagery. Cloaked in acrid yellow hues, it might have been dreamed up in committee by David Cronenberg, Luis Buñuel and the Polish master of freaky psychosexual gloom Andrzej Zulawski, whose surpassingly weird Possession (1981) this very much recalls. With its strong dosage of dream and male-centred eroticism (Mélanie Laurent and Sarah Gadon, as the two men’s partners, barely register as characters), Villeneuve’s film is eerie, unsettling and ultimately opaque: a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a murky spiderweb. I’m not convinced, but Enemy has morbid elegance to spare, which should guarantee it some long-term cult prestige.
