Review: Enemy

City Paper grade: A-

Stirring together hypersexual creep-outs with camp straight off a Twilight Zone storyboard, Denis Villeneuve’s latest is calibrated to stoke conversation — there are enough weird Internet term-paper theories out there already to power a Tumblr for the remainder of 2014. But all that analysis might actually distract from Enemy’s biggest strengths, which sit above the surface. Shot in tandem with Villeneuve's bleak, mechanical Prisoners, Enemy is run on a motor of mood, and absorbing its Easter-egg aesthetics is the key to unlocking its motives. Based on Portuguese novelist José Saramago’s The Double, the movie presents itself as a meat-and-potatoes doppelgänger tale, with humdrum schoolteacher Adam (Jake Gyllenhaal) discovering, via a film recommended by a co-worker, a man who looks exactly like him. Anthony, also played by Gyllenhaal, is married with a pregnant wife (Sarah Gadon) and involved in some questionable dealings outside the workplace. Adam, who lectures to his classes about totalitarian strategies to squelch individualism, doesn’t seem to grasp that he’s trapped in an anonymizing ego-masher of his own design, stuck doing the same things, in the same order, with the same exasperated girlfriend (Mélanie Laurent). Adam and Anthony’s eventual meeting, and the swift unraveling of comforts and expectations that comes as a result, can be sliced and diced into whatever shape the audience pleases. It’s Villeneuve’s determined pace, informed by a morose and elegant sense of style, that brings the whole thing a notch above X-Files exposition.