Unraveling the mysterious world of ``The Enemy.'' Pleasure entangled in sweet chaos.

“The Enemy” Synopsis

One day, university history lecturer Adam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is recommended a video by a colleague. He watches the movie as requested, and discovers an actor in a small role who looks exactly like himself. Adam was so surprised that he felt frightened, and the next day he began searching for the actor like a man possessed. After finding out his name and keeping an eye on him from a distance, she becomes desperate to meet him and talk to him, so she finally contacts him. That weekend, the two meet face-to-face and discover that they have the same face, voice, and physique, as well as the same date of birth, and even their acquired scars are in the same position. Which one is the “original” and which is the “double”? Why are there people exactly like me? They find themselves in an extreme situation from which there is no turning back, and their respective lovers and wives become involved as they follow an unimaginable fate...

Index

• Chaos is undeciphered order
• Symbol of a spider
• Interpretation 1: Symbolically expressing the inner feelings of a repressed man
• Interpretation 2: The world as seen by people with dissociative identity disorder
• Interpretation 3: The man who met his doppelganger
• Interpretation 4: (Really) Enemy

Chaos is undeciphered order

This is the epigraph for Denis Villeneuve's film The Enemy. This sentence is based on the original novel of the same title by Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago (slightly shortened), and the Japanese translation (translated by Koji Abe, published by Sairyusha) says, ``Chaos is an order that must be deciphered. ``From the book of ``.'' Since the Book of Oppositions is a fictional book, these words can be considered a hint or guide to the subject by Saramago himself.

Saramago, who is also known to movie fans as the author of `` Blindness ,'' directed by Fernando Meirelles and starring Julianne Moore, weaves stories in a unique writing style that combines narrative and dialogue. The speculative dialogues that the characters engage in using metaphors are like philosophical discussions or Zen questions and answers, and on the surface they are certainly full of chaos.

Spanish screenwriter Javier Guyon and director Villeneuve boldly trimmed down the verbose dialogue of the original, while adding elements that reinforce the theme of the work, creating a first-class suspense drama filled with the joy that only a movie can. In this article, I would like to develop four possible interpretations of the work, mainly using the differences from the original as clues, and for those who have not seen it yet, without spoiling it.However, if you want to watch the movie without shutting down all information, we recommend viewing it after watching the movie.

Important differences from the original work

In this section, we will list the important differences between the original novel and the movie that are related to the work's theme.

・The place where the main character, history teacher Adam (Jake Gyllenhaal), teaches has been changed from a middle school to a university. As a result, the difficulty of the lectures has increased, and the content has become more suggestive, such as ``dictators and their methods of control'' and ``history repeats itself.''

-Another main character is actor Anthony (Gyllenhaal), who looks just like Adam, but his wife Helen (Sarah Gadon) is a pregnant woman with a big belly in the movie. Helen says she is ``six months pregnant,'' but her abdomen is swollen and swollen, as if she is in full term (she may have lied intentionally).

-The image of a spider, which is repeated in dream scenes, does not appear in the original work (more on spiders later). In the novel, the monkfish is repeatedly mentioned as an object of disgust for the teachers. I wonder if their rounded bodies and shaky feel are common features.

-The secret club that Anthony visits in the beginning, which offers sexual spectacles, is a unique element of the film.

-The novel is set in a huge city with an unspecified country population of 5 million people, but the movie shows the CN Tower, the landmark of Toronto, Canada's largest city (population approximately 2.7 million people).

Symbol of a spider