It is said that sometimes a new idea takes Hollywood by storm and so you see a whole bunch of movies sharing similar themes being released at around the same time. Enemy isn’t a Hollywood film since it’s a Canadian-Spanish production. But it is still hard to otherwise explain why The Double and Enemy, two very similar films, were both released in 2013.
This one is interestingly based on a novel that is also called The Double, but a more recent one from 2002 by a Portuguese writer José Saramago. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a college history professor who specializes in the subject of totalitarian governments. Despite having a regular girlfriend, his life seems to be joyless one and the same sense of quiet despair subtly permeates the world he lives in. One day, he notices that an actor playing a bit part in a movie he is watching looks identical to himself and becomes obsessed with the idea of tracking this actor down and meeting him. As the title of the film implies, they don’t exactly become fast friends.
Of course, there are important differences between this film and The Double. In the other film, only the two characters seemed to realize that they look alike. In this one, it’s plainly obvious to everyone and much of the story is about them impersonating each other. It’s also more visually obvious in The Double that it isn’t set in our world. Save for its oppressive atmosphere, the world of Enemy could pass for our own. But then every once in a while director Denis Villeneuve throws the audience for a loop by inserting short sequences of disturbing and impossible sights, centered around the theme of giant spiders.
Like its counterpart, this is a film that by design resists making narrative sense in favor of conveying a very specific sense of horror. On an intellectual level, I think I can appreciate what it is trying to accomplish. Part of it is the same theme that runs throughout Dostoevsky’s version of the story, that having two copies of the same person is anathema to the universe and that both are able to intuitively sense that there is something fundamentally wrong about there being two of them. The theme of spiders I think is meant as a reference to totalitarian regimes and how they suppress individual expression.
Unfortunately I don’t quite get the emotional impact from it that the director plainly intended. Of course I don’t really get the identity theft horror that Dostoesvsky was going for in the first place. In the post-Singularity fiction that I like, having multiple versions of yourself that differ from each other only in tiny ways is a pretty normal thing. At least for The Double, the artfulness of its visuals made it rich and dramatically powerful even if its theme didn’t resonate with me. Enemy is actually much less approachable and I can’t make my mind whether this means it’s more clever in what it means or simply that it really is less richer.
As such, I have to say that Enemy was a disappointment for me. There’s no doubt that it’s interesting and different, and maybe those qualities alone make it worth watching. But overall, and especially judged against The Double, I found it wanting.