SPOILERS follow.
Enemy unabashadely steers you towards the wrong conclusion, with all the subtelty of a man hiding a sawn-off shotgun down an undersized pair of speedos. The two Jakes (which this film might as well be called) are never seen in the same room. Beyond all the restraints of logic and plausability this absurdly-constructed narrative struggles to maintain the mystery of whether or not they are in fact the same (schizophrenic) person, while periodically cutting away to CG shots of spiders and naked women walking on ceilings. Enemy asks two questions.
1. Are there really two Jakes?
2. How is that possible?
It answers the first question. Then, before the credits roll, it cuts to another spider shot.
After the film ended, I looked up an explanation on the internet. Note: this is not something I'd normally do under any circumstances. I have never looked up an explanation for a David Lynch film, whose work I have always loved. There have been a lot of comparisons to Lynch. The director clearly is trying to "be Lynch". (See: the Isabella Rosselini cameo & the scene with the key.) Like Lynch, the director has said little, in terms of explanation. Unlike the bulk of Lynch's work, however, the film is simple enough to decipher in its entirety - more or less.
The explanations that I've read are a bunch of absolute horse shit. This isn't a deep film. It's pretentious shit. The video above is twenty-five minutes (a third of the length of the fucking movie). I listened to the beginning. He said it took him two months to decipher a film about a doppelganger with spider cutaways. WTF? LONG sections of the film are without dialogue. The characters are minimalistic, almost caricatures really. The relationships are largely unexplored. I mean, there's VERY LITTLE to decipher, aside from the spiders. They weren't in the novel the film was adapted from, by the way.
I assume that the idea of a totalitarian state was developed in a more sensible way by the author and that the director/screenwriter, realizing the impossible task of translating some of the subtler aspects of the novel into film, decided to just go with spiders. I mean: it worked for Kafka, right?
The reaction this film has provoked pisses me the fuck off. Critics are such cowards, when it comes to pretentious art-house films that bluff symbolism.
I enjoyed the film, until it became apparent that there was no pay-off. I enjoyed it, thinking that it was leading somewhere. In the end, it wasn't just a waste of time. I actually felt cheated.
This film is a cock tease followed by a kick in the balls; it's a three-hundred piece jig-saw with two-hundred and ninetny eight missing pieces; it is a conundrum constructed by fools, for fools.
Enemy is the worst kind of pretentious art-house crap.
0 stars.
