Enemy: Things Unsaid

Too many scary movies over-explain themselves. Often this makes them less scary than they could be, because the unknown is pretty much the bedrock of scary in all its forms. Sometimes it works, the sudden reveal, the introduction of new information, but often it just makes the unknown more known and robs it of its power. Like, this is one way we teach children to deal with their nightmares - to face them, see them for what they are, to understand them and thus make them less scary. If you’re trying to scare people, deny them understanding.

Enemy reveals almost…almost…nothing, and it makes for a deeply uneasy film.

It opens with a title card: “Chaos is order yet undeciphered,” and this made me roll my eyes a little bit because it’s got more than a whiff of freshman dorm room bong-rip philosophy to it, at least as an opener to a film. But it isn’t necessarily wrong - the different between disorder and order can certainly be a matter of scale and distance, of perspective. And it’s pretty key to understanding what follows.

From the title card, we move to the interior of a car, where a man is listening to a voicemail message from his mother. She enjoyed the visit to his new apartment, though she can’t understand how he can live like that - the passive-aggression wrapped in a tissue of maternal concern. This is Adam Bell, and he’s a history professor. He lectures a class on the ways dictatorships have historically controlled their populations, beginning with Rome’s bread and circuses. Adam teaches, goes home, eats dinner, has sex with his girlfriend, gets up, goes to school, teaches, goes home, eats dinner, and so on. Adam lectures on the cyclical nature of history, on the patterns made by events.

One day, a colleague asks him if he’s seen a particular film. Adam doesn’t really…go to the movies, but asks his colleague for a recommendation. The colleague recommends a film, and Adam watches it.

And in one scene, Adam spots someone who looks exactly like him.

Adam is an only child.

On one level then, this is a story about what happens when someone meets someone like them in every way, with their own life, one very different from their own. It begins as a story of obsession and the confusions of shared identity, what it would be like to walk into someone else’s life uncontested and make it your own, however briefly. Indeed, Adam has a double - not just a twin, an actual double, and he’s a moderately successful actor, and not necessarily an especially nice guy. There’s something existential about it - if they’re just like you, and you’re just like them, where do they end and you begin? There’s also a thriller here, about what happens when someone decides they want your life instead of theirs, or in addition to theirs. And that’d be fine, it works really well on that level, largely because it skips the “how is this possible” stuff (which would invariably be a letdown) and gets right to the “and now this is happening” stuff.

But that’s not the whole film. It’s the framework on which the story hangs, but how the story is told adds something else entirely to it. The film is suffused with a yellowish cast throughout, as if we’re glimpsing the world through the lingering remnants of a dust storm, and everyone is stilted, cold, removed from each other. Conversations are halting, unnatural, pauses conveying yawning gulfs between the people talking. It reminds me a lot of the distant, detached feeling in much of David Lynch’s work, keeping us at arm’s length the whole time, making everything feel slightly unreal and off-kilter. The editing is sudden and sharp, scenes and shots cut from one to the other like half-remembered recollections, and around the edges of the story there are hints that there’s much more going on here. Things don’t add up, offhand comments make you pause, recurring nightmare images punctuate each act. We aren’t getting the whole story - there’s more to this than is immediately apparent, and the film ends abruptly on a note that calls everything into question without really providing any closure at all. It feels like we’ve just watched a nightmare which itself is just a façade papering over an even bigger nightmare, and the denial of any explanation for the things we’ve only glimpsed in fragments lingers like a cold lump in the pit of your stomach.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon
Available on Netflix