Enemy sets Jake Gyllenhaal against himself as Adam Bell, a melancholy history professor who discovers there is a struggling bit-part actor out there named Anthony Clair who looks exactly like him. Adam becomes obsessed with tracking down his doppelganger, only to unleash a chain reaction threatening to destroy his entire life.
Adam Bell seems disconnected from life, even as his girlfriend Mary reveals she is pregnant with his child. Late one night, Adam spots actor Anthony Clair in a film who looks exactly like him, shaking him to his core. He discovers Anthony‘s contact details and starts tracking him down, eventually meeting face-to-face. Their encounter sets off a spiral of mistaken identities and imploding relationships as Adam seeks to merge with Anthony to reclaim missing parts of himself.
Plot Summary Diagram
Image: Visual diagram with photos mapping out connections between Adam, Mary, Anthony, Helen, minor characters
To clarify Enemy‘s labyrinthine narrative, the above diagram charts key characters and their changing relationships driving the story. Shy Adam (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his girlfriend Mary (Mélanie Laurent) lead routine lives until Adam becomes entangled with Anthony (Jake Gyllenhaal), an actor who looks identical to him. Anthony is married to high-strung Helen (Sarah Gadon).
Adam‘s fixation on Anthony threatens his relationship with the pregnant Mary. After several mistaken identity mix-ups via phone calls, Adam intercepts Anthony‘s hotel room key, uses it to invade his privacy, and eventually manages an in-person switch. As Adam integrates himself into Anthony‘s life, their identities blur, relationships fray, and perception itself falls apart.
The complex plot requires close attention – audiences must track subtle clues as the film descends into an ambiguous reality where the true nature of Adam, Anthony and their connections remains tantalizingly unclear.
Technical Mastery: Tension-Driven Cinematography and Sound
While the story keeps audiences guessing, technically Enemy also grips tension through Villeneuve‘s masterful shot selection and audio landscape. Cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc bathes Toronto in jaundiced sodium light that makes the familiar city feel alien. The drained color palette echoes the mental state of Adam and Anthony, along with the general population oppressed by the unseen dictatorship.
Right from the opening shot, the film frames its unsettling atmosphere. The CN Tower, a pinnacle of phallic architecture, looms large over the city, symbolizing the shadow authority holds over society and identity. Villeneuve frequently glimpses the Tower in the distance, reminding the viewer of its constant, sinister presence hovering over Adam. The color and lighting transform Toronto into a geography of Adam‘s fractured mind.
The sound design likewise amplifies the distress. Discordant strings and booming reverberations underscore Adam‘s growing mania as he loses grip on himself. Composers Danny Bensi and Sadflux expertly patch sonic textures, from apartment and classroom background noise to the amplified cinema environment. Diegetic and non-diegetic intermingle to make audiences share the protagonist‘s unmooring sanity.
Through cinematography and sound craft, Enemy pulls the viewer into Adam‘s dissolving psychology as the ground crumbles beneath his feet.
Themes: Control, Freedom, Commitment, and Fear
Narratively and symbolically, Enemy tackles the human struggles for identity, purpose and relationships. Most prominently hangs the oppression of dictatorial control that Adam inhabits as a professor exploring censorship. This occupation bleeds into his personal life – he avoids intimacy and fatherhood responsibility, preferring his solitary, repetitive routine.
Anthony represents freedom – a liberated identity living more passionately. Yet Anthony also embodies Adam‘s fears of obligation and vulnerability. Their merger quest, provoked by Anthony‘s wife Helen also surveilling him, sparks chaos from Adam‘s refusal to face hard truths about himself.
Beset by fears of vulnerability and commitment, Adam pursues the fantasy of merging his fractured self. But this defines a terrifying liminal zone between realities.
Psychology of Dissociative Identity Disorder
Image: Brain scan graphic depicting Dissociative Identity Disorder
Enemy powerfully evokes dissociative identity disorder (DID) – the presence of two or more distinct personality states or identities within a single body and consciousness. Previously known as multiple personality disorder, it affects 1-3% of the general population. Those like Adam repress memories and emotions too traumatic to process except via dysfunctional amnesic barriers between selves.
Through its doppelganger premise, Enemy explores the psychological schism and dysfunctional re-integration in DID. The film trains audiences experientially on the terrifying dissociation Adam suffers. We share his unhinged break from reality as he splits selves then pursues fusion through invading Anthony’s identity. Their confrontation poignantly dramatizes the difficult integration of splintered personalities in DID therapy.
Decoding the Symbolism: Eyes, Spiders, and Keys
To manifest Adam’s self-battle Enemy uses repeated symbolism open to interpretation, most strikingly numerous eye closeups. Eyes symbolize perception, hence the belief they provide windows into the soul. The doubling premise warns eyes can navigate truth and reality unreliably.
Spiders recur frequently, initially representing the stalemate strangling Adam. Their webs suggest the state surveillance web curtailing privacy and freedom. Spiders also embody Adam’s relationship fears ensnaring him, though those also offer meaning he secretly desires.
The hotel key temptation transgresses Anthony’s private world, yet unlocks Adam’s path to the doppelganger merger his fixates upon heedlessly. This key comes to signify Adam’s willingness to destroy his public identity and relationships chasing after his shadow self.
Character Analysis: Archetypes and Influences
Adam Bell and Anthony Claire: Splintered Selves
As doppelganger characters, Adam and Anthony together represent the schism in a single identity. Their names even hint at a fractured bell within a bell. Adam’s existence as a professor aware of state authoritarianism but hesitant to directly challenge it reveals him as an intellectual attached to ideas but afraid of action.
Anthony better embodies active independence, yet also deeper isolation and unhappiness in his suspicions around his controlling wife Helen. They each lack personal fulfillment and meaning. Together they complete the larger self neither can sustain alone. Yet Adam refuses self-knowledge, instead chasing a fantasy escape through stealing Anthony’s identity.
Humorously Jake Gyllenhaal in real life shares his name with the artistic Biblical figure Jacob wrestling with his night visitor angel – a metaphor for fighting his conscience over wrongdoings. This myth echoes Enemy’s divided lead character and his struggle to consciously process his splintered psyche’s angelic and demonic aspects to attain salvation.
Mary and Helen: External and Internal Demons
The doppelganger device splits the anima archetype across two feminine characters each representing varied threats within Adam/Anthony’s unstable mind. Helen manifests intense intimacy fears – the devouring, engulfing partner eroding autonomous selfhood. Mary embodies responsibility aversion as the pregnant, nascent mother infringing on freedom.
Mary actress Mélanie Laurent compared her role to origami. She shifts from sweet and generous to deeply troubled. As Adam transfers obsession onto Anthony, his sparse interactions with Mary grow darker until she finally appears as the story’s consummate monster dragging Anthony to oblivion. This suggests Mary represents Adam’s destructive projections onto femininity itself.
Sarah Gadon’s Helen attempts clinging to suspicious Anthony but drifts into depression and instability as he pulls away, likely into full Adam personality integration. Given Enemy’s projection themes, Helen’s shattered psyche may echo Anthony’s own consciousness dissolving under Adam’s quest for merger.
Critical Reception: Hypnotic or Incoherent?
Critical opinions polarized wildly. Negative reviewers dismissed Enemy as murky pretension and plotting too frustrating for rewards. They blasted Villeneuve for valuing ambiguity over substance. Some analysts suggested clues pointed to at least one person’s death.
Yet more discerning critics discovered a mesmerizing puzzle box in tune with psychological exploration. They praised Jake Gyllenhaal’s high-wire portrayal of a fraying psyche. Enthusiasts celebrated Enemy’s tone poem quality with discomforting form and content dragooning the audience into paranoid purgatory.
In a mixed review, the Atlantic’s Govindini Murty identified M.C. Escher and Kafka influences in the “baroque, trapdoored” script co-written by Villeneuve exploring Adam’s loss of “anchor in the shared reality.” She highlighted Bolduc’s washed out cinematography and praised Gyllenhaal’s “simmering volatility.” However Murty critiqued Villeneuve’s inability to tie themes together satisfactorily.
Fans particularly admired Enemy’s commitment to tonal control and visceral experience over linear explanations. Writing for indieWire, Eric Kohn awarded Enemy an A- grade, extoling Villeneuve’s handling of ambiguity: “Enemy is one puzzle that leaves all the pieces intact.” For The Film Stage’s Jared Malo, the film’s technical bravura generated “an all-encompassing feeling of dread.” He summarized it as “Kafka-esque, Lynchian, and downright confusing, but breathtaking at the same time.”
The Verdict: An Enduring Cult Surrealist Mystery
While some recoiled from its challenges, the passage of time cemented Enemy’s reputation within subsets of daring cinema appreciative of experiential surrealism and psychoanalytic complexity. Those attuned to subconscious themes discover rich fodder for analysis in the film’s strands of identity dissolution, relationship anxiety and reality rupture.
Enemy recently topped a public fan poll ranking Villeneuve’s films, indicating significant lingering affection. Cinephiles entranced by cryptic plotting extend endless interpretation efforts picking apart scenes and symbols. Video essays continue unpacking new facets years later as the endless dissection of Stanley Kubrick classics inspires. Like these visionaries, Villeneuve exercises full directorial control to unlock spectator psyche exploration beyond surface entertainment.
In 2021 article for 25YL analysing psychological horror, Caemeron Crain singled out Enemy as the “gold standard” for deploying “the human tendency toward denial” about innermost fears. He praises how it hooks viewers’ perception into its “weird world” until “we are not sure what is real.” Embracing uncertainty andAlien alienation primes the mind to receive Enemy’s deeper ideas.
Crain also perceptively notes how Enemy’s dictatorship theme ties to its identity splitting – totalitarian states engineer enemies, whereas democracies contain the other within. The film ultimately leaves which scenario explains Adam tragically open. Is his downfall self-inflicted through refusing self-integration? Or does society itself spawn his suffering by narrowing identity possibilities? Like raw psychology‘s entanglement, Enemy tangles interpretation. For limited theatrical release a truly uncompromised surrealist tone poem could never enjoy, its convoluted artistry deserves appreciation.