To those who loved Richard Ayoade's The Double, we say: Best get over here or this swish, tricksy adaptation of José Saramago's Dostoyevsky riff.
It's the little things that make Enemy special. The lighting and aperture-bleeding that make a peroxided Sarah Gabon (the new Julianne Moore, surely?) look like an angel from an extra- terrestrial species. It's whiter than Daz or Lynch's white picket fences or Carrie's last stand.
Or an opening sequence, set in some class of underground sex club, which manages to do in three minutes what Stanley Kubrick couldn't muster with a million times the budget and an extra 20 minutes in Eyes Wide Shut.
"It was Hegel who said that all the great world events happen twice and then Karl Marx added the first time it was a tragedy the second time a farce." So says Jake Gyllenhaal's history lecturer, tellingly, just as his workaday life becomes decidedly creepy. It all starts with a movie. A boring colleague recommends a boring film called Where There's A Will, There's A Way. And that's when our hero spots his double, an extra, in the background. Soon enough, his relationship with his girlfriend (Laurent) becomes strained while he's frantically attempting to contact his doppelganger, who turns out to be a narcissistic actor with a heavily pregnant wife (Gadon).
Woo hoo. Two days into 2015 and we have a contender for our end-of-year top 10. Hell, if this movie doesn’t yield your favourite twist ending of the season, at least, we’ll refund the price of this review. Forget that. Long before the sucker punch, this is infinitely intriguing fare.
Made just before Prisoners, the first collaboration between director Vileneuve and actor Gyllenhaal, is, we think, the superior get-together. Prisoners boasted superb timing and direction; Enemy has both plus a splendidly weaselly, post-Cronenberg disposition. All hail the disconcerting score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans. Check out the bipolar cinematography (War Witch's Nicolas Bolduc). And Mr Gyllenhaal: you turned out to be the smartest kid in the room; don't think we haven't noticed.
