This week in movies you missed: Last weekend, I shuddered my way through the tense thriller Sicario (review here). Two years ago, I was a fan of Prisoners, by the same director from Québec — Denis Villeneuve.

Between those two movies, Villeneuve made a very Canadian art film called Enemy, shot in Toronto and starring Jake Gyllenhaal. I watched it for free via Amazon Prime (where it's also available for rental), wondering how different it would be from The Double, another art film on a similar theme that hit the U.S. around the same time. (It was the subject of a previous Movies You Missed.) For extra confusion, Enemy is loosely based on José Saramago's novel The Double, the other movie on Dostoyevsky's classic of the same name.

And, of course, Enemy poses the question: Are two Jakes better than one?

What You Missed
The film opens with an enigmatic scene of almost-soft porn involving a nude woman and a spider. This is sort of explained later in the story, and sort of not really at all. In any case, be assured it is Lynchian.

Anyway, we know something is up, because in that first scene, Gyllenhaal appears to be watching the erotic scenario (along with a bunch of other men). Yet when we see him in subsequent scenes, as history professor Adam, his life is not nearly that interesting.

Adam spends his days lecturing to undergraduates on dictatorships' control mechanisms (he likes to write "truth" and "reality" on the board, with those quotation marks) and his nights not appreciating the erotic attentions of his girlfriend, Mary (Mélanie Laurent).

Nothing seems to make Adam happy or engaged with life, until a colleague suggests he watch a cheesy movie. On the screen, Adam spies a bit player (a bell hop) who looks exactly like him. Intrigued, he follows clues until he meets his physical double, Anthony (yeah, also Gyllenhaal), who lives in a much swankier apartment than Adam's with a gorgeous pregnant wife (Sarah Gadon) who looks weirdly similar to Mary.

From here, the film follows the perspectives of both Adam and Anthony, and things get confusing. Very confusing, because they even have the same facial hair. Did I mention that spiders start popping up in odd places, including a surreal shot where an arachnid looms over the sickly, yellow-tinged city? Yup, something's up with those spiders.

Why You Missed It
Enemy never reached Vermont to my knowledge. It played in 120 U.S. theaters and won several of Canada's Genie Awards.

Should You Keep Missing It?
My 20-point, highly scientific scale for the assessment of indie films:

1-4 points: Does it look pretty?
4/4. You can always count on Villeneuve for arresting images — stark silhouettes, shadow play, shots that artfully reveal and conceal. Working here with DP Nicolas Bolduc (not the great Roger Deakins, who shot his more mainstream films), he turns Toronto's modern skyscrapers into a landscape of dread-soaked, vertiginous dreams. Cronenberg comes to mind, but the look is less sterile and more expressionist.