REVIEW - ENEMY

Why read reviews? If you want to know what a film is about, watch the trailer, read a synopsis. If you want to know if a film is any good, go see for yourself. Why should the subjective experience of any one particular person - whom you've likely never met - have any bearing on your decision to check out a particular film or not? So, then, why write reviews? What am I scribing here night after night for? I'm not going to write about the film's plot, because then this wouldn't be a real review. And I'm not going to write about the film's meaning, in this instance, because I'll admit that I'm not even certain what that is. I'm going to write about my subjective experience of watching it. I'm going to write about the ever-constricting sense of dread Denis Villeneuve instills in dimly-shaded cinematography, disorientating angles and an insidiously restless edit. And the sinister, vaguely fugue-like string score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, whose contribution in this regard is immeasurable. I'm going to write about the drama he extracts from a story so ostensibly basic that it could be described as a mere motif, on which these 90-odd minutes are a series of riffs. It's a gripping story, truly, as lingering shots, silent passages for which dialogue feels like the relieving puncture in an atmosphere that grows more and more taut by the second, draw your attentions inwards, inside the characters' confused and conflicted minds. I'm going to write about the mystery, which is largely what sustains this moody film, and the brilliant means of finding resolution to it that Villeneuve and writer Javier Gullon (adapting from Jose Saramago's novel) have devised. If it can be considered open-ended in one respect, with the mystery remaining tantalisingly unsolved, then it is masterfully concluded in another, and we realise that the clues to this mystery were there all along, in the marvellously unsettling dream imagery that Villeneuve inserts at junctures - it's not just there to creep you out, though it definitely does all the same. If you want answers to all of your questions, search again, since I believe they're all here, though you'll have to do the hard work yourself and decipher their significance, and the threads that bind them. I'm not going to write about those answers, though. I'm going to write about one of the most fascinating exercises in cinematic style this year. Actually, I just did.