The Returned

(Manuel Carballo, 2013, Canada/Spain)

The zombie genre has gone through something of a renaissance over the past ten years, becoming more popular and ubiquitous than ever. Since roughly the release of the Dawn of the Dead remake in March 2004, just over ten years ago – or perhaps even earlier, depending on your definition, as 28 Days Later… came out in 2002 – zombies have gone mainstream, growing from a second-rate horror movie monster into the pre-eminent cinematic creature of our time. In that time, we’ve had fast zombies (in the aforementioned Dawn redo, scripted by James Gunn and directed by Zack Snyder), funny zombies (in Edgar Wright’s zomromcom Shaun of the Dead), Nazi zombies (in the Norwegian horror/comedy Dead Snow, amongst countless other films I’m sure), hipster zombies (in last year’s Warm Bodies), tsunami wave zombies (in the highest-grossing Z-movie of them all, World War Z), and, of course, televised zombies (in the insanely popular series The Walking Dead). It’s been a wild ride.

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.