Critics reviews

. . . One of the all-time great Toronto movies: the baffling and brilliant Enemy, which at the height of "Torontopia" recast the GTA as a jaundiced metropolis thick with webs of deceit and paranoia. Aided immeasurably by the dual performance of his Prisoners star Jake Gyllenhaal as two men who mysteriously share the same face, Villeneuve melded the cryptic symbolism of his first films to an ever-subtler and more sophisticated visual technique; the result was a miniature mindfuck classic.

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.

All this is highly indicative of a filmmaker who's having a grand old time. That might come sometimes at the viewer's expense, but it's hard to begrudge Villeneuve his indulgences when they yield this much pleasure. The director seems consistently delighted at this opportunity to shift away from the high-minded seriousness of Prisoners and Incendies (2010) and demonstrate the same flair for the absurd he showed in Maelstrom (2000).

There's a boldness to the storytelling and a gutsy suppression of detail and explanation, but the problem with Enemy is that its subtle manipulations feel all-too self-conscious. The film doesn't convince that what it's about would amount to anything more than drunken psychobabble, with character motivations getting hazier as the runtime ticks on.

I'm not particularly concerned about whether or not Villeneuve, or any other director, meant for his film to be funny; what matters is the text, and based on the evidence Enemy is indeed a playful, terrifically amusing film.

This is fitfully successful as a mood piece, though the dream imagery is heavy-handed, the characters sketchily realized, and the high-toned dialogue comes out stilted more often than not. This is best enjoyed for the wordless sequences in which Villeneuve and cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc exploit Toronto's postmodern architecture to creepy effect.

...Enemy offers a refreshing change of pace [for Villeneuve], a quick gloss on a surreal scenario with an illustrious literary provenance, suitably more beholden to atmospheric tone than to baseline plot logic. If Enemy is ultimately unsatisfying, though, that is largely because of how scattershot it feels, especially for a movie of such brevity and velocity, content to toss off loaded suggestions without attempting to marshal those toward any larger purpose.

Less ambitious (and, at 90 minutes, far shorter) than those films, it's inevitably less impressive, more like a semi-whimsical short story by a master whose real forte is challenging realistic novels of epic scope. Yet that's not to suggest the three films are entirely different. Also tinged with the quality of nightmares, the violence in "Incendies" and "Prisoners" was, or had the feeling of being, fratricidal or internecine.

Given its intriguing premise, pulled from the pages of a novel by Portuguese author José Saramago, Enemy could have gone in a number of different directions—black comedy, Hitchcockian suspense, even cloning-gone-wrong horror. Assumedly, any one of those hypothetical movies would have been more fun than this actual one, a dreary exercise in banal sexual fantasy.

Textural details like the underground haunt populated by tarantulas, masked strippers straight out of Eyes Wide Shut, and a final shot unlike any you've ever seen will inspire many to revisit Enemy often. It isn't just a more rewarding Villeneuve-Gyllenhaal collaboration than Prisoners but also the director's finest work sincePolytechnique.

Director Denis Villeneuve does an expert job in creating a yellowed, washed-out Toronto, an almost abstract place, perfect for his Hitchcockian blonds to swan around in, alluringly. The mood is hypnotically quiet, tinged with surreal flashes such as a huge Louise Bourgeoisian spider dangling over the cityscape. Your crowd will exit in a spooked jumble after witnessing Enemy's final shot, and though the moment certainly adds fangs to the mind games, it feels just as detachable as its leading man.

In some sense, Enemy functions as a deft parable about the perils of modern masculinity, with two hapless men trapped in the biological cycles that make them both aggressors and victims in their own lives. This idea is established without defending their actions, communicating the inherent peril of intimate relationships within a beguiling thriller framework, which combined with the evocative atmospherics assure this as Villeneuve's best effort in some time, despite an abundance of minor issues.