Watched: Enemy

Speaking of movies that leave you ill at ease (thanks, Foxcatcher!), Enemy definitely falls into that category. After watching this film, I read the Wikipedia entry on in at least 3 times in an attempt to understand what the fuck it was I just watched. I still can't argue I completely get although I did re-watch parts of it after reading some background about it and I picked up much more on the themes of surveillance and inhumanity than I did the first time. I'm also just going to go ahead and spoil this for you because it is a big WTF that has apparently (again, according to online reading) ruined this for a lot of people: in the end the two Jake Gyllenhaals end up switching lives, essentially, and the one married the kind of naive, fearful blonde lady pictured below (Sarah Gadon, who is so gorgeous looking in this otherwise incredibly ugly film) thinks he's got it made. He's walking around his new apartment and hears his wife go into the bedroom and when he goes to follow her instead of his wife there is a giant, terrified tarantula in the corner. Like, it's taking up a corner of the room and huddling in fear. Then the movie ends.

SO YEAH. THAT FUCKING HAPPENS.

I remember when the trailer for this came out because it was around the same time that the trailer for the other strange, indie doppelgänger movie came out, The Double. I still want to see that one, especially as it was directed by Richard Ayoade (director of Submarine, star of IT Crowd) and adapted from a Dostoevsky novella. So that's some pedigree! Anyway it should be interesting to compare and contrast them when I finally get around to seeing that, especially since Jesse Eisenberg is such a different kind of actor from Gyllenhaal.

Speaking of which, Gyllenhaal. Even though for long stretches of this I had no idea what the hell was going on, and I thought the cinematography was (purposefully, yes, and understandably, okay, but still) an eyesore, I found it completely watchable because of the two performances he gives. Between this, Nightcrawler, Prisoners, Source Code, Brothers (as misguided a remake as it was), Zodiac, Brokeback Mountain, Jarhead, etc., I find him so watchable. Not necessarily devastating or attractive or anything, but just very very good at building a character through small cues. He's a really great actor, no caveats, full stop. I'm definitely intrigued by the dramatic stuff he's got coming out this year, especially Southpaw and Everest.

As for this movie, if you don't like mind-bendy and COMPLETELY TO THE POINT OF LAUGHABLY pretentious and ambiguous endings, skip it.

Oh yeah, there's also a scene where a giant spider is crawling around what I'm pretty sure is Toronto, and it's not addressed at all, it's just a cutaway transition between scenes. Because surveillance and stuff.