Very few directors have picked up the gauntlet thrown down by David Lynch's films such as "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive." These are films steeped in mysteries so deep that Lynch himself is positively daring audiences to wrap their heads around them; they are the cinematic equivalent of an M.C. Escher painting — paranoid psychosis poured raw into the flask of film noir.
One director who has accepted the challenge is Quebec's Denis Villeneuve. In his new film, "Enemy," he plays with cloudy mental states and the idea of a doppelganger — something Lynch has worked into just about everything he's done since the final episode of "Twin Peaks." Villeneuve's film also features an ominously symbolic key straight out of "Mulholland Drive," and Lynch's old muse Isabella Rossellini even shows up in a cameo. "Enemy" is an unsettling and enigmatic film that inspired torrents of Internet commentary seeking to "explain" the movie. Yeah, good luck with that.
The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a tweedy history professor with a dissatisfied lover (Melanie Laurent). One sleepless night he rents a movie and is baffled to find an actor in a bit role who looks almost identical to him. Curiosity gets the better of the professor, and pursuing it — he discovers his double on the Net and begins stalking him, trying to learn what he can — leads down a rabbit hole of twisted dread. The other guy is an actor (also played by Gyllenhaal) with a pregnant wife (Sarah Gadon, who'd make a perfect Hitchcock blonde), and he has some sort of sinister undercurrent in his private life. When the two finally meet, the meek professor is intimidated by his aggressive twin, who has a proposition for him — a proposition with bad results.