The unlikely Denis Villeneuve movie that channelled ‘Planet of the Apes’
In recent years, Denis Villeneuve has become one of the most exciting and celebrated directors working. Villeneuve is known as the man who was finally able to successfully (sorry, David Lynch) adapt the sci-fi epic novel Dune, which boasts one of the most star-studded casts in recent memory and sees Academy Award-nominated Timothée Chalamet in the lead role of Paul Atreides.
Villeneuve was already a renowned director before putting his long-held favourite story to screen, securing a Best Director nomination for the science fiction drama Arrival in 2017, a film that shows first contact with an alien species, who arrive suddenly and communicate in an entirely different way to humanity.
Despite recent years showing the director’s mastery of science fiction, with Blade Runner 2049, a sequel to the Ridley Scott neo-noir adding to his roster of examples in the genre, Villeneuve explored the thriller genre to great success with Prisoners, Enemy and Sicario, all being widely applauded as impressive examples of the directors understanding of tension, action and character.
It’s on 2013’s Enemy that Villeneuve would draw on his love of science fiction to create his psychological thriller that saw the director reunite with actor Jake Gyllenhaal, whom he had worked with on Prisoners that same year.
Enemy is the story of Adam, a history professor who, while watching a movie, discovers a charismatic doppelganger in the form of the actor, Anthony. Adam becomes increasingly obsessed with Anthony, leading the two men to intense confrontations and intertwined lives that see them swap places, lying to their respective partners. The film sees the unravelling of identity and leaves many questions unanswered by its shocking and unnatural climax, which sees a final scene showing a giant tarantula in place of Anthony’s wife, who has chosen to be with the kinder Adam, reflecting the sordid activity of women crushing spiders for the pleasure of men shown in an underground club that Anthony attends.
The science fiction influence comes not in the form of giant spiders, however, but from the architecture of one of the most iconic genre films of all time, Planet of the Apes. Villeneuve wanted to evoke the same feeling he felt watching the 1968 film, mentioning “the architecture. The feeling of the landscape. The paranoia” that he wanted to mimic.
The director recalls describing the “brutality of the landscape’ to his production designer, who would tell him ‘stop. I found what you’re talking about, but it’s been done before, and it’s in The Planet of the Apes. Villeneuve would himself laugh at the reference and the surreal nature with which it relates to Enemy. He’d further explain that the film was made with a “bunch of friends who wanted to play with cinema”, describing his movie as “playful”, and one that drew on other influences of his like Hitchcock’s film The Tenant, the film Vertigo, and fellow science-fiction master Stanley Kubrick.
