Enemy

Canadian director Denis Villeneuve's "Enemy" is a stylistically remarkable but narratively undernourished entry into the familiar genre of Doppelgänger-thriller.

The technical craftsmanship invested here is undeniable. Chronically underlit but done so in a waxy, faded fashion, the movie looks gorgeous and creepy from the get-go. The unsettling sense of an alien beauty is further enhanced by the sleek camerawork that often finds unexpected, slightly disorienting angles into a scene and the architectural backdrop of Toronto that's mutely foreboding in its hypnotic geometry. Finally completing the oppressive visual spell is the bold, borderline showy editing, which disrupts the order of the already cryptic frames some more to give the whole thing a proper puzzle-like feel. The score is also effective. From the tiniest sound of a spider scurrying on glass to the bossy, ominous strikes of the timpani, it's all part of a lush and scary soundscape.

Which is, of course, why it's so frustrating for me not to be able to embrace this movie. Despite the superb job on the visual and aural design, the film is exceedingly light on charater- and motive-building. Thinking beyond any superficial level and asking about the plausibility of the actions portrayed would bring one immerdiately out of the trance and cast everything in a somewhat silly light. So even with a stupendously ballsy ending that kind of, sort of comes brilliantly full circle and demands you to connect the dots scattered from the very beginning, the feeling of being cheated by a measly short bloated to feature size that's a little too confident for its own good is hard to shake.