90 minutes – Thriller
Language: English
Festival release date: September 8 2013 – Toronto International Film Festival
Release date: March 14, 2014 – Canada
Production companies: Pathé, Entertainment One, Telefilm Canada, Corus Entertainment, Televisión Española, Movie Central, The Movie Network, Ontario Media Development Corporation, Mecanismo Films, micro_scope, Rhombus Media, Roxbury Pictures
Canadian distributor: Entertainment One Films

Adapted from the 2002 novel The Double by the late Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago, this is a story or unreal reality, of visions too hard to believe yet believable, about doppelgängers and self doubt and questions of sanity. Shot between May 22 and July 13, 2012 in what some might call the soulless steel and glass towers of Toronto’s burgeoning highrise forest, Jake Gyllenhaal plays the role of Adam Bell, a usually glum, disheveled history professor, who seems disinterested even in sex with his beautiful girlfriend, Mary (French actress Mélanie Laurent). While watching a movie Adam spots what appears to be his exact double, an actor named Anthony Clair, in a bit role, and decides to track him down. The identical men meet, and their lives become bizarrely and irrevocably intertwined in this (as one TIFF programmer called it) “hypnotic, haunting, surreal approach that reaffirms the Quebec director (Denis Villeneuve) as one of our generation’s most skilled storytellers.”

A Canada-Spain-France corpduction, Enemy screened as a Special Presentation at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival.

Poster and trailer courtesy of Entertainment One Films.