Enemy (2013)

I’m going to coin a phrase: Pretentious Depth.
It’s when a creator makes a piece of media that’s over-the-top artsy for the sake of claiming that they’re being “deep,” to the detriment of actual character development or story arc.
I’m sure you’ve seen it in plenty of “artsy” movies, it’s just never had a proper label before.

But man oh man, did “Enemy” (2013) have it in spades.

For starters, the movie opened with a weird, drawn out scene of a stripper stepping on a tarantula.
It was a “crushing” fetish thing, and there was a crowd watching her, so it was clearly some kind of pay-to-watch event.
And in that crowd we saw Adam (Jake Gyllenhaal), who seemed just as intrigued as the other guys.

That led to a series of really bizarre dream sequences where there were tarantulas just chilling out around Toronto. One was as tall as a sky scraper, one was a naked woman with a tarantula head, another was a room-sized tarantula in his room.
You know. “Deep” things.
None of which paid off in any way.

Then Adam saw himself in a movie, played by an actor named Anthony. Not someone who looked eerily similar. An identical copy of himself. Hair, face, body shape, etc.
Identical.
He was absolutely and reasonably freaked out.
Everyone’s seen their Hollywood doppelgänger, or their XXX doppelbänger, but seeing an identical copy of yourself when you’re not a twin is fair grounds upon which to lose it a little bit.
But when Adam tracked down Anthony, instead of straight-up saying “Look dude, some quirk of the universe has made us identical,” he stuttered and played coy and came across like a churlish fangirl on the phone instead of a dude who just found his implausibly-existing twin.
When they finally met, Adam and Anthony acted like two indoor cats that met each other during their first outing ever. They were panicky and weird and immediately aggressive in a way that didn’t make sense for two guys who just found each other.
I’d be freaked out by a duplicate Alex too, but screaming “did you fuck my wife?!” would not be anywhere near the top of my conversation list for any period of time.

Because Adam and Anthony were played by Gyllenhaal, and both lived in mediocre apartments, and the entire film had a weird sepia filter, it was surprisingly hard to tell which one we were watching when they were just sitting at home.
It was, obviously, easier to tell when they were in a scene with another character, like when Adam was with Mary (Melanie Laurent) and Anthony was with Helen (Sarah Gordon), their girlfriend and wife respectively.

Most of the movie was scored by a string quartet that really enjoyed long, slow strokes on the bass.
Not “Inception”-style intensity building. Just long strokes.
Or, when not hurting your ears, there was silence. No monologue, no dialogue. Just frustrating silence.

There was also a scene of a highway. 15 seconds of highway.
I know 15 seconds doesn’t sound like a long time, but when it’s not thematically important, it feels like infinitely longer. It wasn’t focused on any characters, it wasn’t a story-specific road. It was the highway, viewed from above, and nothing more.

Adam, who was a college history professor, shared a lesson that history repeated itself, and referenced the quote from Marx that “the first time is a tragedy, the second time is a farce.”
Because this movie insisted on being deeeeeeeeeep, there were multiple scenes that copied previous scenes, showing them from different angles or permutations.
While those scenes followed a trope as created by the dialogue, they didn’t lend anything to the movie and just ended up being wasted time.

At one point, Anthony decided to take Adam’s girlfriend (Mary) out on a date, and Adam went to Anthony’s house, all “Parent Trap”-like.
It’s always a fun idea, but an impossible concept to actually execute on.
While Adam and Anthony appeared to be identical in almost every way, Mary and Hellen looked similar (tall, blonde women) but were obviously not identical.
Thus: the instant Anthony started talking to Mary, the ruse should have been up. He knew nothing about her, or Mary’s history with Adam.
Idioms, memes, in-jokes, and anything else Adam and Mary had between them would have been completely lost on Anthony and Mary should have suspected something was wrong instantly. Same issue with Adam and Helen.
But, because this was a movie and characters are always two-dimensional enough to get duped like that, Adam got away with it, though Anthony was somehow given up by a single misplaced scar.

Ultimately, we saw that Anthony was just a raging asshole, while Adam was a relatively calm, if not mousey, man. Not a great character dyad, but a marginal way to show their ying-yang differences.

The ending was barely tolerable, and it felt like such a long trip to have to get there.
I’m absolutely not recommending that anyone see this.