“Chaos is order yet undeciphered.”
Enemy was exhilarating, I was so tensed during the whole movie about what was going on and couldn’t look away. Even if you set aside the doppelganger plot of the movie, the world and details in it that Denis Villeneuve created are beautifully exhausting and suffocating. I was taking screenshots and zooming in to a scene of a character turning off lights because I wanted to see if the design of the switches mean the setting is a dystopian one, that’s what this movie was doing to me lol
It has this dystopain kafka-esque feeling to it that you can’t stop what’s happening and you don’t know what’s happening. The city in Enemy has this perpetual yellow haze over it that seems to wash over on everything and affect the characters as well as what’s going on in their minds. The two characters often have vivid dreams of the city scape with a giant deformed spider walking above it and it seems to represent to me, this influence of ugliness and stagnant-ness. It’s like a cloud of yellow exhausting cancer over everything which detoriates itself into people’s subconciousness and makes them do ugly things.
Regardless of whether or not you understand it or not or whether there is something to understand about it, Enemy is a suffocating, beautifully acted and well-directed movie that evokes feelings in me that movies rarely do.
It’s a very focused and well constructed movie, like details I mentioned feel intentional, like they mean something or maybe they don’t and it’s just a stylistic choice.
I loved it, 7.5/10
I understand the sentiment. I have lot of thoughts about whether this movie is just too much style and little substance, like most of the story beats that drive the plot forward happen randomly but you must have seen how atmospheric it is, the movie has a lot of spider imagery even without showing them on screen
I guess, for me, its an issue of expectations.
spoiler
The movie didnt seem to be avant garde until that very end where they hit you with (I guess) an entirely metaphorical ending scene. Nowhere else was the film as symbolic or whatever, so me as the viewer is expecting an actual ending scene about the whole life-swapping/pregnant wife situation but instead I get hit with a giant tarantula and have to basically go back to re-examine the entirety of the film for its spider symbolism.
If that intent was built up more throughout the film I may have been primed more for it and could interpret it more openly, but it felt like a total shift in context that essentially made me feel like I wasted all that time.
I put this up there with endings like ‘it was all a dream after all’.
I did get a “it was all a dream” feeling out of this so ig you’re not wrong. The giant spider was a step in the right direction but we could have used more surrealist images