Enemy (2013)

Summer 2014 has come and gone and with it we got stories of superheroes,dragons,and of course apes on horses!However with the end of the scorcher season comes Autumn,a darker time where darker movies come out and to send of thr summer I end it with a review of a film that tackles adultery,self-conflict,totalitarianism and other much darker themes.The film is called Enemy,and it might be the most compelling film I have seen in 2014.

Enemy is the story of history teacher,Adam Bell (JAKE GYLLENHAAL) who,one day out of the blue,gets a movie recommendation EH😃 from a coworker.So he finds the movie at a local rental store and upon a rewatch,discovers that a certain actor in the movie looks exactly like him,minus an awesome beard.So Adam discovers the man is Anthony Claire(ALSO played by GYLLENHAAL),who's a small time actor,who actually happens to live in the same neighborhood himself,and the two look alikes to unravel just what the hell is going on and as a person who really supports going into these kinds of movies as oblivious as possible that's really all I wanna say about the plot.It's a pretty...riveting film to say the least.

That being said,this is NOT by any means a movie for everyone!Not just because of the unconventional way the film or the story are crafted,but just because of the touchy subject matter that the movie portrays.The simple story of JAKE GYLLENHAAL'S twin characters may sound like a Lindsay Lohan style,quircky time but let me tell you guys that the story of Enemy,when really looked into,is really a well written and acted story of a man who's trying to overcome his inner demons and personal problems that are wrecking his life and loved ones.It's a hard movie to review and more of a movie for discussion.And THAT ladies and gentlemen is why I like this movie WAY more than most people might!The symbology and images used to tell the story like the use of spiders is great.I love when a movie can tell a story by mere images and scenes that contain very little dialog,it's credit to director,DENIS VILLENEUVE'S excellent vision and the strong cast performances.

Which brings me to Mr.JAKE GYLLENHAAL,his performance in this movie is terrific.May I remind you that he plays two roles,which means two different characters,both with their own unique physical trademarks,ways of speaking,even walking posture and that's why I was so blown away by how good,JAKE pulled of his roles.His career has really blossomed as of late and with NIGHTCRAWLER releasing in a few months I've got this guy on my top actors to watch list.There is a supporting cast as well,with MELANIE LAURENT and SARAH GADON both who are really great opposite the two Jakes.I really enjoyed their characters and the raw emotion that they showcase.

The movie is technically flawless to me,some people might get turned off by the simple color palette but it really gave the movie the right look and tone.The musical score is also fantastic,you can tell a lot of it may have been inspired by the movies of ALFRED HITCHCOCK like VERTIGO'S classic score.Actually a lot of this entire movie really feels influenced by HITCHCOCK'S work.

ENEMY is my favorite kind of movie,one that promotes thought,discussion,and really shows that movies can be SOOO much more than MEGAN FOX running in slo-mo or constant reboots and sequels.There are unique stories that can be told by talented story tellers in ways that may not be told in a traditional,movie way.ENEMY is a movie that sucks you in with it's chara

Fmovies: With last year's successful thriller Prisoners, Canadian director Denis Villeneuve made a name for himself among American moviegoers. A year later, with the release of Enemy, the impact Villeneuve has left doesn't seem to be anything that will die down any time soon. Reteaming with his Prisoners star Jake Gyllenhaal, Enemy proves Villeneuve's versatility by telling a mind-boggling mystery with stunning twists and turns, deep hidden meanings, and a tremendous double performance by Gyllenhaal.

Adam Bell is a disheveled, run-of-the-mill everyman living in Toronto, Canada, where he works as a college history professor. When he's not teaching at the university, he's sitting around his high-rise apartment in a bored manner or making love with his girlfriend, Mary. Life for Adam is, for a lack of a better word, boring.

Things change when a colleague recommends a movie to Adam. Not a fan of watching movies, Adam very reluctantly agrees to rent the film from a local video store. Initially unimpressed with the movie, Adam notices something odd within the movie: one of the actors, by the name of Anthony St. Claire, looks like him. Identical to him, even. This strange discovery fuels an obsession within Adam. An obsession that faces him with situations he would have never expected.

Adapted from Jose Saramago's The Double, Javier Gullon's screenplay leaves the true meaning behind these events up to the viewer. Although there are very subtle hints to the general idea of the story, there is no clear cut answer to the many twists and turns faced within the film's 90 minute run time. What may be a story of totalitarian beliefs to one viewer, as referenced in Adam's lecture in the beginning of the film, may be a story of marriage in the modern era. It's amazing how screenplays like these can have such a wide range of themes without any of them being wrong.

Despite a talented cast including Melanie Laurent, Sarah Gadon, and Isabella Rossillini, it's Jake Gyllenhaal who steals the show. Gyllenhaal delicately balances the introverted, resentful nature of Adam with the loud, imposing personality of Anthony. It's even more impressive that this performance stands as one of Gyllenhaal's finest in his long list of great roles. Gadon gives a surprisingly great performance, managing to say a lot with just a long glance at Gyllenhaal. Laurent and Rossillini have smaller roles, but are important assets to the story nonetheless.

Enemy has the eerie atmosphere and the thrilling plot that Prisoners had, but that's really their only similarities. Whereas Prisoners was grounded in reality, Enemy is more dream-like, more surreal. This all comes through Villeneuve's delightful directing style, featuring some truly frightening imagery that will strike a nerve with its viewers. However, the hypnotic nature of the film never takes away from its storytelling, which is woefully important for a film that relies this much on its storyline.

Enemy isn't for everybody, but it's target demographic is sure to find the film to be spellbinding and hypnotic. Villeneuve's devious directing is sure to keep the viewer on the edge of their seat the whole time, up until the chilling final frame before the film cuts to the credits. Gyllenhaal holds up the entire film with his bravado double performance, as well as the fantastic supporting cast. With all this together, Enemy has proved to be one of 2014's earliest successes, and it is going to prove to be a tough o

Denis Villeneuve, whose last two films were the hugely impressive Incendies and Prisoners, has concocted a real oddity here. If you can imagine David Lynch adapting a Kafka novel, then you will be in the right neighborhood! In Incendies and Prisoners,Villeneuve inserted serious moral and social issues in the context of first rate thrillers' Here he follows the same tradition but the tone is more abstract and absurd. Neverherless, Enemy, adapted from a novel by the Nobel prize winner Jose Saramago, is always gripping and totally fascinating. A man (Jake Gyllenhaal) gets a recommendation from a colleague to watch a particular video. The main actor in the video appears to be his doppelgänger and the two agree to meet. To reveal any more would lessen the enjoyment of this highly original film. Well worth catching.

Enemy fmovies. Portuguese author José Saramago (1922 – 2010), whose celebrated novels can be seen as allegories and commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor (BLINDNESS, SEEING, THE STONE RAFT, THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO Jesus Christ, DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS, THE CAVE, ALL THE NAMES, CAIN etc), published THE DOUBLE in 2002: it took more than 10 years before being transformed for the screen by Javier Gullón and directed by Canadian Denis Villeneuve. For those who remain under the spell of Saramago's strange and seductively intelligent writing this film will satisfy. For those who prefer linear story lines of everyday possibilities the film will likely not find an appreciative audience. This is a film that demands the full attention of the viewer and the acceptance of alternative ways of viewing reality and alternative reality.

Living in Toronto, Adam Bell Jake Gyllenhaal) is a college history professor, a loner, routiner, whose contact with the world outside the classroom is limited to life with his live in girlfriend Mary (Mélanie Laurent). A fellow teacher (Joshua Peace), apparently attempting to open Adam's vistas, recommends he watch films and recommends a particular film to Adam. When Adam watches the film he notes an actor playing a bellhop who looks like Adam. He becomes obsessed with finding out about this double of his. He learns that the actor's stage name is Daniel Saint Claire, whose legal name is Anthony Claire (again Jake Gyllenhaal). Claire is a Toronto based actor with only a few on-screen credits, and is married to a woman named Helen (Sarah Gadon) who is six months pregnant. Adam becomes obsessed with meeting Claire, who he learns upon first sighting that they look exactly the same, from the facial hair to a scar each has, but Claire who seemingly better adjusted than Adam. Their lives become intertwined as Claire himself ends up becoming obsessed with Adam, but in a slightly different way. Is Adam viewing his alternate real self (a married man with a child on the way) and escaping his reality with an affair with Mary? It is left for the viewer to decide.

The atmosphere created by the actors (Gyllenhaal is excellent as are Laurent, Gadon, and Isabella Rossellini who plays Claire's - or Adam's? - mother), the cinematography by Nicolas Bolduc and the music score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans are stunning. The introduction of a tarantula motif adds further mystery to this vivid film. A film for adventuresome thinkers who enjoy being challenged. Grady Harp, September 14

Denis Villeneuve garnered a lot of attention for his mainstream success with PRISONERS, starring Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal, but it was it smaller, more obscure release that I wanted to see. ENEMY was released around the same time as PRISONERS but never saw a national release and I had to wait for the home video release to finally catch it. Watching it, I figured out why it never went mainstream. Most general audiences don't like something they can't understand, and ENEMY is probably best described as a mental cluster fuÂ…mess. It has a surface plot that's easy enough to understand but the film is loaded with symbolism and deeper themes. Most of which can't be discussed without entering spoiler territory so I won't touch on it much, but this is a movie that inspires discussion orÂ…at the very leastÂ…will leave you contemplating it long after it ends. I know my first viewing led to two days of thought trying to decipher what I'd seen and it wasn't until I scoured the Internet, reading over the frustration of others and the myriad of proposed meanings, that I felt I'd come to an understanding. But that's me and my obsessive nature, and others can do their own research. On the surface, ENEMY is about history teacher Adam Bell (Gyllenhaal). Adam is suggested a film from a work colleague that he might enjoy and becomes obsessed when an extra in the film looks exactly like him. He tracks the actor down, Anthony (also Gyllenhaal), and discovers they're physically identical in every way. And then it gets weird.

At first impression, ENEMY is a very depressing film. It's incredibly dark with lots of shadows and harsh lighting, and the entire movie has this bizarre yellow tint to it. Everything is has an unnerving yellow sickness to it. And the characters…well, no one is happy here. Adam is a depressing little man. He doesn't say much and he's very socially awkward. He's got a beautiful girlfriend named Mary (Mélanie Laurent) but there's some unknown tension between the two of them. She seems to come to his barren apartment every night and the two of them spend a minimal amount of time together before moving to the bedroom, and she always seems to leave in anger or exasperation when it's through. Anthony is more outgoing, more confident. He's married to a beautiful woman (Sarah Gadon) in a crumbling marriage racked with previous infidelities on his part. She seems hopeful that he's changed but the recent events where he hides his meeting with Adam have her wondering if he's returned to old habits. Everyone's pretty miserable but Adam finds hope for something interesting when he encounters his doppelganger. Whatever it was that piqued his interest, it fades fast as the two come face-to-face and Adam immediately regrets it. Anthony immediately moves to do what pretty much any one of us would probably do if we discovered we had an exact duplicate somewhere in the world with a beautiful girlfriend.

The surface plot is simple enough but there is so much more boiling beneath the surface of ENEMY. Honestly, I'd seen it twice and couldn't quite piece it together on my own. I only came to full understanding after doing some additional searching around the web for interpretations. I didn't have to do all the supplemental research. The movie's was perfectly fine as a piece of head-scratcher entertainment. I wanted to do it. I found ENEMY so enthralling that I wanted to know more. It's a very slow moving movie and spends most of the

Asking for your attention at all times, providing little clues in almost every sequence & still leaving you puzzled in the end, Enemy inclines more towards art house cinema than mainstream features and isn't going to please every viewer out there. It tells the story of a college professor living a mundane daily life who later seeks out his doppelgänger after spotting him in a movie thus setting in motion a chain of events which culminates with terrible consequences.

Directed by Denis Villeneuve (director of Incendies & Prisoners), Enemy is an ambitious work from the director who, of lately, has been steadily rising as one of the filmmakers to watch out for and is another fine feature in his bag. The writing makes a fine adaptation from the novel it's based on but also infuses more allegories & symbolism in the form of spiders into the script to keep the viewers guessing from start to finish.

Performances by the cast is very good with Jake Gyllenhaal playing the college professor & his lookalike movie actor with fine subtlety & the contribution by the supporting cast is strong as well. Cinematography captures the film with a very warm colour temperature blended with high contrasts along with excellent use of lighting. The background score has a pretty muted presence in here & editing has carefully structured the film with layers after layers of visual motifs.

One thing that'll bug its audience is if Jake Gyllenhaal characters are different persons or same. Other thing that'll leave them utterly confused is the ending if they still haven't figured out the meaning of spiders in the film. But hints are provided throughout its runtime & repeated viewings will only help in clearing those doubts. On an overall scale, Enemy is that brain-teasing cinematic ride which viewers would either risk to experience or reject it outright. Multiple viewings advised.