Featured Image Credit: Entertainment One
Topics: News, US News, Canada, Film and TV, Jake Gyllenhaal
Kit Roberts
Topics: News, US News, Canada, Film and TV, Jake Gyllenhaal
There are many movies out there with plots and endings which are ambiguous to say the least.
The likes of Mulholland Drive and Inception have had fans scratching their heads for years over their open-ended conclusions.
Fortunately for anyone perplexed by Jake Gyllenhaal's Enemy, a fan has provided an explanation for the frankly bizarre film that sort of makes sense.
Be warned, this article contains spoilers. Obviously.
The movie is directed by Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Dune, Sicario) and follows Gyllenhaal's character Adam as he engages in increasingly shady behaviour.
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Things become increasingly sinister as Adam encounters a doppelgänger named Anthony, with the line between the pair becoming increasingly blurred as the film progresses.
Anyone who's seen it will likely be left wondering: Are Adam and Anthony actually the same person? Is that why they have identical scars? And, for the love of God, what's with the spiders?
You see, arachnids pop up throughout the film, including massive ones crawling over the Toronto skyline, and play a part in the film's head-scratching ending.
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The climax sees Adam walking into Anthony's bedroom to find that Anthony's wife Helen has transformed into an enormous tarantula cowering away from him. For... reasons.
It's all very cryptic and symbolic, but one interpretation seems to give a more rounded idea of what exactly the film was trying to communicate.
The interpretation said: "The spiders represent women, the big spider is
his mother, and the women who squashed the spider is squashing his wife as a spider and his marriage."
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Another commenter gave an interpretation of the final scene that goes down a similar path, saying: "It represents how he now views his partner and committed relationships with women - as a spider luring him in to a trap of responsibility and commitment.
"Basically there's a part of him that wants to continue to live his past life as a player (as represented by the actor version), and in trying to reconcile that with his current self (the responsible professor), he blames her for 'forcing' him in to something that part of him doesn't want (the actor version)."
It continues, saying how the movie 'deals with male anxieties about "settling down" and losing vitality'.
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As for what Villeneuve thinks? He's keeping his cards close to his chest.
He said in an interview: "It’s an image that I found that was a pretty hypnotic and profound [way] to express something about femininity that I was looking to express in one image.
"There’s a strong meaning in it, and I think that if you think just a little bit you will find it quite quickly."
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Think you have too much faith in us if you think we're going to work out what it all means 'quickly', Denis.