Enemy Review

Shot in secret in Toronto with the same star as Prisoners, this is the stranger and smaller of the pair, and the one that keeps growing. A dull history lecturer spots his exact double in a rented film, tracks him down and finds a man with his face, his voice and none of his caution. Adapting Saramago, Villeneuve declines to resolve whether this is a doppelganger, a psychotic break or a man's contempt for the version of himself that agreed to marry.

The city is filtered into a sick sulphur yellow, the score is a mass of scraping strings, and enormous spiders appear over the skyline and in a hotel corridor with no explanation offered. The final shot is one of the great cold shocks in modern film. Whether the whole thing is profound or a trick depends entirely on how much credit you extend, and the dialogue is deliberately flat to the point of inertness, with Sarah Gadon and Melanie Laurent handed almost nothing to play. Gyllenhaal, doing two distinct men without cheap tics, is the reason it holds.