Review of Enemy (2013)

I’ve just watched Enemy, which is meant to be a smart film.  
Guess what, I think it’s rubbish. 

This is the full plot: Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a history teacher. He lives a monotonous life and has a girlfriend, Mary (Mélanie Laurent). One day he watches a film and finds a background actor who looks exactly like himself. He does some digging and finds the actor, Anthony Claire, who goes by the stage name Daniel Saint Claire. He contacts him. 
Anthony (Jake Gyllenhaal) has a wife, Helen (Sarah Gadon), who is 6-month pregnant. It’s said that he had an affair. Helen comes to find Adam at work and sees that he looks just like her husband. 
Anthony and Adam meet in a hotel—it turns out that they look exactly the same, sound the same, and even have the same scar. 
Adam feels uncomfortable and leaves, but Anthony follows him, then follows Mary, whom he finds attractive. 
Anthony then comes up with the idea of accusing Adam of having sex with his wife and thereby convincing him to give him his clothes and let him have sex with Mary in return, then Anthony would return everything and disappear forever. 
For no particular reason, Adam agrees. 
In the final act of the film, Anthony and Mary go on a romantic weekend getaway, and have sex in a motel, whilst Adam goes to Anthony’s house. 
Helen knows that he’s not Anthony, but pretends not to know, and Adam pretends not to know that she knows, and they have sex. 
Meanwhile at the motel, Mary notices the ring mark on Anthony’s finger and asks who he is, she leaves, and later in the car they fight again and have a collision. It’s implied that they’re both dead. 
Next morning Adam goes out of the room, talking to Helen, who suddenly falls silent, so he goes to look for her and, instead, finds a giant tarantula. Then the film ends. 



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The film is rubbish. 
First of all, the dialogue is atrocious. People can talk about the subconscious and the psyche, and some deep meaning behind the film, which I apparently don’t get, but I doubt anyone can (convincingly) defend the dialogue in Enemy. It is badly written, unnatural, and awkward. For almost the entire time watching the film, I kept thinking: Who talks like this? Who reacts like this? The bad dialogue that stood out the most was the conversation between Adam and the colleague who recommended the film, Adam’s talk with his mother, the first conversation in the film between Anthony and his wife Helen (after the phone call—in which she asks if it’s a woman), and the first meeting between Adam and Helen (when Adam doesn’t know that she’s Anthony’s wife). 
It baffles me that the film got nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at Canadian Screen Awards. Can people not tell the difference between good and bad dialogue, or do they not care about dialogue anymore?  
Imagine watching Chinatown, or anything by Billy Wilder, and then Enemy. 
But it’s not only the dialogue. 
I had lots of questions whilst watching the film. Why does Adam Bell do everything so slowly? Why would a teacher—a lecturer—be so inarticulate?  
Why does he always appear confused, hesitant, neurotic, awkward, and just weird? 
Why does his mother tell her not to mention the Anthony thing again? 
Why does she say things that are true about Anthony rather than Adam? (nice apartment, being unable to stick to 1 woman) 
Why does Adam not pick up when his mother calls, and not call her back? 
Why does Helen cry and seem upset after meeting Adam? Why does she react that way?
Why does Adam agree to let Anthony pretend to be him and have sex with his girlfriend, when he himself hasn’t had sex with Anthony’s wife? Why would anyone do so?  
When Mary notices the ring mark that she has never seen on Adam, why does she ask Anthony who he is, when she apparently has never been told of the doppelganger’s existence? 
What’s the point of the sex club, and the key? 
When Helen say “your mother” in the final scene, is she talking about Adam’s mother or Anthony’s? 
What’s the meaning of the tarantula?
Now an Enemy fan would condescendingly tell me not to take the film so literally, and explain what the film is all about. Friends, I know what others have said is the meaning of the film—Adam and Anthony are the same person, Anthony is the subconscious, the cheater in Adam, he lives with his pregnant wife Helen but cheats on her with Mary, and he has to kill that part in him.   
Now let me add, I love Persona and 3 Women. 
I love Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  
I have seen many films about doubles and false doubles, such as Vertigo, Mulholland Drive, The Double Life of Veronique, Dead Ringers, The Prestige, and most recently, L'Amant double.   
Frankly, Enemy isn’t as smart as it seems to be. Part of my reaction is my dislike of films in which the reveal is that everything that we see happen in the film never happens—it is all in the main character’s head. A Tale of Two Sisters is an example. L'Amant double is another. That to me is a cheat.   
Let’s go back to the premise of the film: a history teacher comes across his lookalike, so he tracks him down, and is forced to switch places. They have different jobs (teacher and actor) and live in different houses (Adam lives in a shithole, Anthony lives in a nicer apartment) and have different personalities (Anthony is the evil one). The film is driven by the mystery of why they look the same, and what they can or may do when they are indistinguishable—this is a mystery to the audience as well as to the characters involved. 
There is a hint in the film about Adam and Anthony being the same person—at the beginning, Adam searches for Anthony, then finds a photo of himself in the house and places next to an image of Anthony in the internet. The photo is torn—he seems to be next to somebody but we can’t see who it is. At the end of the film, we see that photo again in Anthony’s house, now intact, and next to him is Helen. Otherwise, the interactions and reactions in the film rely on them being different people. In the 1st meeting between Adam and Helen, she is shocked by the resemblance whereas he doesn’t recognise her, so she calls her husband Anthony and hear him answer the phone, as she watches Adam going back to the classroom. 
As I said, the film is driven by the mystery of why they look the same and what 2 indistinguishable people can and may do, so when it turns out in the end that they are parts of the same person, with Anthony being the subconscious, it goes in a different direction and feels more like a cheap reveal. 
If the film is the mind of a character having a nervous breakdown, this isn’t an interesting character. Jake Gyllenhaal does a good job at portraying the 2 men with different personalities, so even though they have the same haircut and beard, and are dressed similarly, the audience never have to wonder who is who in the scene. But the characters are flat. All of the characters in Enemy are flat, especially the women, who seem to be there only to have sex and be treated like properties to be owned and traded. 
I haven’t even written about all the images of spiders all over the film—the spider about to get crushed by a woman in the sex club, the huge spider towering over the cityscape of Toronto, and the giant spider in the end. What’s that all about? It looks more like the filmmaker puts in random symbolism to be deliberately cryptic and ambiguous. 
Overall, I think Enemy is all artifice. It seems disturbing at the beginning, then falls flat. And it’s not as smart and profound as some people seem to think it is.