"Enemy"

A college professor who becomes obsessed with tracking down the minor actor he spots in a movie that looks remarkably like him.

Take note. This is how you put together a trailer for a (great) psychological thriller without giving the story away. Enemy, based on the novel ”The Double” by José Saramago, represents another team up between actor Jake Gyllenhaal and French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve after Prisoners (technically their first collaboration as this one was filmed before Prisoners). As Gyllenhaal is asked her to pull double duty as two characters at extreme ends of the spectrum in regards to personality and temperaments and does it quite convincingly, I think this will stand the film that adequately protrays Gyllenhaal’s acting talents.

Enemy was the last film I screened at the TIFF last year. I almost missed seeing it in favor of leaving for the airport early; I’m really glad I didn’t. Here is what I had to say about Enemy: “What is great about this film is that Villeneuve ventures out of the lines of a straight adaptation of the novel and confounds this already dark and moody story with Fight Club-esque psychology and unsettling surrealism. And with that, with probably five minutes of new art house material that bookends the film and a couple of small deletions from the main novel plot, Villeneuve creates a unique experience all his own and shapes a very different kind of story. This is a film that is its own amazingly weird entity, that feeling of something undetectable crawling on your skin captured on-screen.” (full review)

Interestingly, the movie that the professor sees to alert him to the existence of his doppleganger is different from what was shown when Enemy was on the film festival circuit. I’m really curious why they changed it and how that plays into the feel of the film.

Enemy will have a VoD premiere on DirecTV (Feb 6) and then open in theaters (March 14).