Something isn’t sitting right with this guy.

His name is Adam Bell, and he teaches history, and he looks really bummed out. But it’s important to establish the context for this incredibly bizarre movie, a movie that would be strange had it been made by the most Lynchian of independent filmmakers, but is even stranger coming from a guy who’s since been entrusted with the reins of a franchise.Įnemy is about a man, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. From the brutalist architecture of the University of Toronto Scarsborough campus to the crisscrossing wires of the streetcars to the sepia-heavy color schemes to the camera, which dollies beautifully through the entire film, every element in front of Villeneuve’s lens helps build a sense of dread and foreboding.īy this point, if you know anything about Enemy, you’re like, “Cool, we get it, Villeneuve’s good - but what about the spiders?” We’ll get there.

Villeneuve is a master of mise-en-scène, and in Enemy, just as much as the two later movies he’d be lauded for, there’s an incredible consistency and intensity to his vision. Like Sicario and Arrival, Enemy is a saturated film, every moment practically dripping with suggestion in the case of Enemy, that suggestion is of menace, danger, and calamity inching ever closer, frame by frame. In a certain sense, Enemy, a loose adaptation of José Saramago’s The Double, is an excellent harbinger of what Villeneuve had on deck. He’d just done Prisoners, the project that marked his transition from the critically revered Canadian films Polytechnique and Incendies into Hollywood proper, but he had yet to make Sicario and Arrival, the two movies that would solidify him as one of the best directors currently working. When Enemy came out in 2014, Denis Villeneuve was in between phases.

Previously in this series, we covered the ending of Donnie Darko. Jake Gyllenhaal – one of him, at least – in Enemy.Įver watched the end of a movie and thought, “I have no idea what I just watched?” Vulture is here for you! We’ll be going back and taking a look at some notable endings in film, trying to explain what happened, why, and what it all really means.

Enemy front proper crack only