‘Chaos is order yet undeciphered’: this opening line looms over Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy (2013), implying a meaningful interpretation beneath an entangled surface. Among Villeneuve’s feature-length films – from Un 32 août sur terre (1998) to his 2021 remake of the science fiction classic Dune – Enemy offers like no other a fascinating conflation of modes of filmmaking, storytelling strategies and genre conventions. Scholarly analyses of Villeneuve’s dark drama have yielded vastly different interpretations of the story revolving around the protagonists Adam and Anthony (both played by Jake Gyllenhaal): two men who live different lives but look exactly the same. Nearly all academic endeavours have been dedicated to identifying the ‘real’ protagonist, understanding the film as a psychoanalytic exploration of a character’s subconscious. In this chapter, I address these studies’ underlying assumption that the key to untangling Enemy’s chaos is the relation between the two protagonists.

Contradictory readings emerge from the question of how to understand the film: is it a psychological game of cat-and-mouse; the fantasy of a man who escapes into another, or possibly even two other lives; or the tragic story of a man who broke down after he lost his wife due to his own failure? Enemy is a puzzling mystery for audiences to engage with as Villeneuve cleverly keeps different interpretations in balance, offering affirmation, ambiguity and contradiction to different hypotheses at the same time. The story of Adam and Anthony allows mimetic, (magical) realist, psychoanalytic and allegorical readings that balance each other out, leaving spectators wondering at the order behind the implied chaos.

In order to address Enemy’s intricacy, this chapter foregrounds the film’s narrative structure that is best described by its experimental features. Since the early 2000s, scholars in film studies and narrative theory have analysed such productions in the broader context of narrative complexity in cinema, a tendency in filmmaking and storytelling that has flourished since the 1990s. Scholars attempted to describe the diverse corpus of complex cinema as a phenomenon, trend, tendency and even a (sub- or micro-) genre (Klecker 121; Thon 176).