The movie Denis Villeneuve views as a sibling to ‘Enemy’: “My most personal movie”
Denis Villeneuve has been on an amazing run over the last few years. His mind-bending sci-fi drama Arrival scored him a Best Picture and Best Director nomination at the Oscars. Then, he picked up where Ridley Scott left off and made Blade Runner 2049, which was praised as a worthy sequel to the genre-defining original. In 2021, he unleashed a masterful adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which was followed by an equally magnificent sequel three years later. The two Dune movies are some of the best examples of big cinema from the last few years, and a third instalment is eagerly awaited.
Before he did all that, the French-Canadian made smaller, yet no less brilliant, films like 2013’s Enemy. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a pair of identical men, the story follows the duo as they explore aspects of each other’s lives, leading to startling revelations about their own existences. It’s not a simple watch, often challenging the viewing on questions of identity and mortality, but it is a must for surreal cinema fans.
When Villeneuve spoke to Film Comment about the movie, he was asked about an earlier film he’d made called Maelström. The interview pointed out the similarities between the two pictures, and their director said he was right on the money. “They are brothers in some ways,” Villeneuve said of his two creations. “I thought of them together when I was writing and shooting Enemy. My challenge was not to fall into the same traps. But I knew I was in the same area.”
Maelström, which came out in 2000, is one of the many early Villeneuve films in the French language. It’s also completely bonkers. The opening scene is of a talking fish being gutted by a fishmonger, which prompts him to tell a story he knows. That story is of a woman (Marie-Josée Croze) who suffers from depression and accidentally kills a man in a hit-and-run accident. Then, she enters a romantic relationship with his son, because that’s the natural next step in that chain of events.
The filmmaker mentioned that his next two movies, after Maelström, 2009’s Polytechnique and 2010’s Incendies, were more grounded and based in reality. He wanted to return to the sublime, so he made Enemy, which contains more absurdist elements, although nothing on the level of a talking fish. This starkly contrasts to Prisoners, the other movie of his that premiered in 2013. That also stars Gyllenhaal, though this time as a detective trying to track down two missing girls. The movie focuses on his fraught relationship with Hugh Jackman’s Keller Dover, the father of one of the abducted children.
Anxiety also plays a key role in both Maelström and Enemy, which Villeneuve said reflected the state of the world at the time. “There are always different kinds of anxieties throughout history,” he remarked. “But right now there’s something more definite about it. There’s a possibility, a real possibility, that we are facing a wall. This is something that I see in children, how they look at the future in a very bleak way.”
Whilst Enemy is undoubtedly a fantastic film, it failed to make much of a splash outside of Villenuve’s native land. However, it was a private triumph for the man from Quebec, as he called it “my most personal movie.”
