On the Corrupted Masculinity of Enemy

In 2013 Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners was one of the surprise hits of the year. It snuck up quietly with a great cast and showed us how the character driven thriller should look. Little did we know that the same year, Villeneuve and Prisoners star Jake Gyllenhaal adapted Jose Saramago’s The Double as Enemy. For some reason, the film only made it to UK screens at the start of this year.

With Enemy being based on a text, about doppelgangers (at the opposite ends of the personality spectrum) and being imbued with a yellow, brown filter you would be forgiven for thinking you were seeing a remake of Ayoade’s The Double (2013), based on the Dostoevsky text. Yet, in this case it seems that great minds do think alike, and then produce vividly different interpretations of the doppelganger mythology.

Where The Double went dystopian, Enemy favours ambiguity in location, familiar in much of Saramago’s work. Even though Toronto is revealed as the setting, it is an unfamiliar Toronto located on the peripheries, unsettling for an audience who may think they know what to expect. The narrative plays out much like expected, with the two opposites switching elements of their lives, seeing what they most desire in each other. Gyllenhaal plays both fantastically.

Enemy, in a surreal stylistic addition, uses the image of a spider, in one case as an actual sized spider, another as a monster terrorising Toronto and thirdly as a metamorphosis of a female character. This spider most likely (for it is never conclusive) represents femininity as the arachnid can be a symbol of creation and the woman whose metamorphosis we witness is pregnant.

In this, Enemy becomes an observation on the control of women by an uncertain patriarchy. This is highlighted by the ‘good’ twin who is corrupted by the ‘evil’ twin’s obsession with control and women, symbolised by his taking ownership of the key to a perverse, underground sex club. And in a shocking concluding scene, the spider returns, afraid, in the face of this twisted masculinity. Enemy is not to be missed.