Enemy

(Denis Villeneuve, 2013, Canada/Spain)

The opening, unattributed epigraph of Denis Villeneuve’s dark psychological thriller reads, “Chaos is order yet undeciphered,” an indication of the bizarre, seemingly cryptic tone the film will strike. To me, it immediately recalled Richard Kelly’s divisive 2009 work The Box, which began with Arthur C. Clarke’s famous quote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and went on to present a world filled with dread, illusion, and abstraction. Enemy is similarly ominous and philosophical, positively dripping in mood and atmosphere, and far less concerned with character motivation and narrative trajectory than formal richness and thematic resonance. Villeneuve is one of the best cinematic stylists of our time, and his films – from the black-and-white starkness of Polytechnique to the harrowing intensity of Incendies to the suffocating gloom of Prisoners – are always impeccably crafted, if crudely scripted. His latest is more of the same visual brilliance we’ve come to expect, augmented by compelling subtext and an enigmatic ending.