Review: Enemy (2013)

One of the things I personally have really enjoyed about getting into the movie blogging community is the discovery of films I would have never come across before. The last film I saw thanks to this was Snowpiercer, which I loved, and another film I saw a lot of reviews come in for was Enemy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. How did one of his films pass my radar? I love this guy.

The film itself is about Adam (Gyllenhaal), a quiet lecturer. One day, a colleague of his recommends him a film, and on a whim, Adam rents it from his local film rental store. When he watches it that night, he is shocked to see an actor that looks exactly like him. He then becomes hell-bent on tracking this man down to meet him, which causes confusion for himself and all he meets.

Within the first 5 minutes of Enemy, I knew this was a very creative film. I actually wondered for a moment whether I had put the right film on, especially as I’d already looked up the synopsis. There’s a lot of metaphors, and spiders! There’s definitely a sense of things not being as they seem throughout the whole film, which leaves you questioning everything. One thing I loved was that everything in the film has a purpose, there isn't a spoken line that has no meaning.

Jake Gyllenhaal was fantastic in this, playing two characters with distinct personalities, from Anthony who is confident and cocky, and Adam who is quite the introvert. I think it’s the type of role he was born to play to be honest, he does it so well. 

The ending to Enemy will stay in my mind forever. I wasn’t expecting to jump out of my skin, and I didn’t sleep well at all that night! I tweeted about it straight away and I think it was Rhys at Feeling Fuzzier who shared the same feelings as I did. After getting over the shock though, my next thought was ‘what?!’. It was the first time since Inception that I had to spend the next hour on the web looking into an explanation of what had just happened. After reading up on it though, I was amazed. It’s just that clever.

I want to give Enemy a hugely high score just for the sheer complexity and Jake Gyllenhaal’s acting, but the only thing that let the film down for me were the huge periods of time where virtually nothing happened. My need to work out what was going on kept me watching, but some parts were sadly plain boring.