This article contains spoilers for Enemy. You’ve been warned.
What would you do if you found out there’s someone completely identical to you? Would you become obsessed? Or will you let it go and go on with your life?
Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy was adapted from the book titled Double, a book written by the renowned Portuguese writer Jose Saramago. The story explores duality and identity, and the relationship between the two through its protagonist.
As a quick synopsis one can say the following about the plot. Adam Bell, a history teacher at a university, discovers his perfect doppelganger while watching a film. This creates an obsession in his mind to discover the truth behind their complete physical similarities.
The tone & style that Denis permeated into Enemy are quite distinct to other films. It has a dreadful & ambiguous sequence of events that elevate the tension & the mystery and also teases the viewer’s mind with subtle hints & visual cues. The film is all in a sepia color palette that focuses on close-ups and dollied transitions, the last of which helps the audience follow the story more easily. This combination of elements helps deliver the desired & needed thrilling feelings in the viewer that come with the genre.
Our Mind as the Enemy: The Loss of Individuality
Aligning itself between an erotic thriller & a doppelganger film, Enemy poses much more thematic complexity than meets the eye. It explores dual personalities that on a physical level seem to be the same while being psychological opposites. Chaos & Order. Shyness & Confidence. Routine & Unpredictableness. With symbols such as spider webs & totalitarianism, Enemy exposes a tale on the loss of individuality.
It’s no coincidence that the film starts with Adam giving a class about dictators.
Let’s explain briefly what totalitarianism is about. In totalitarianism, the individual is subjected to follow the group’s ideology. He or she is imposed with what he must say, think, act and else. It is the slow degrading of one’s identity only to merge into another or subject oneself to the decision of another. Totalitarian behavior is not only reserved to dictatorships, but also to closed groups, organizations, or sometimes even niches inside common ideological groups, religions, demographics, etc.
The dangerousness of totalitarianism is that in it, the individual loses his voice, whether willingly or unwillingly. In it, ideals can surpass reason to favor the group’s success, but sometimes harming the individual’s interests that also are submerged in the group.
Enemy explores one of the end-results of totalitarianism, the loss of individuality, through his main character Adam. This is done by slowly showing how he starts losing control of his thoughts, actions & surroundings, through the hands of his doppelganger and his assertive, yet delusive actions.
An Ambiguous Ending to Think Upon
Enemy combines the brilliance of three great artists in their profession: Saramago, Villeneuve & Gyllenhaal all combine to deliver an ambiguous & symbolic cautionary tale about individuality. It poses many questions regarding the reality of the events from the plot, giving subtle hints throughout all the runtime about the possible answer regarding the mystery between who is Adam & Anthony.
Are they the same person? or are they just the result of an inexplicable universal taunt on both their lives? Are their similarities a causality or coincidence?
Those answers will linger forever in your mind. Your interpretations and conclusions will need to be born from within yourself since this film’s intentions are completely ambiguous. It lets you be the one to decide the answers.
The truth is, Enemy has a very scary ending. During the climax, which happened in parallel through Adam and Anthony being with each other’s partner, you get to see Helen accepting Adam above his actual husband and have sex with him while being pregnant.
At the same time, you watch Anthony crash his car and kill both Mary and him after she panics about the fact that she was tricked to lay in bed by an impostor when she discovers a ring mark on his finger. And finally, the ending has Adam walking the next day to see Helen in her room, only to stumble upon a giant f****** spider in the corner, instead of her.
Trying to make sense of the actual logic of the possibility of the events in the film & trying to understand the story will only break you. This film, as its original story in the book, aims to leave a clear message:
It speaks on a thematical level through metaphors, parallelisms and individual events on the dangerousness of totalitarianism and the loss of individuality.
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