Enemy, the latest cinematic pairing of director, Denis Villeneuve, and his Prisoners leading man, Jake Gyllenhaal, is anything but your average Hollywood fare. Filled with ominous foreshadowing, creepy imagery (hello tarantulas!) and a plot that laughs in the face of linear storytelling, this tale of dueling doppelgangers unfolds instead like a fever dream, luring the audience in with its seductive spell before quickly spiraling into delicious insanity.
Yet it’s not just the skillfully controlled chaos that separates Villeneuve’s film from this year’s glut of double-themed pics (seriously, it’s only March and in addition to Enemy, Jeneé Lemarque’s The Pretty One, Arie Posin’s The Face of Love, and Richard Ayoade’s The Double have all tackled the same subject). What makes the movie so unique is that it also happens to be one of the sexiest films to hit theaters in quite some time. Credit Gyllennhaal and his smoldering chemistry with his two leading ladies, Inglorious Basterds star – the fabulous Mélanie Laurent, and Canadian it girl, and current Cronenberg muse, Sarah Gadon.
Don’t worry if the name, Sarah Gadon, isn’t as familiar to you as say as her costars, because soon it will be. As Helen, the cuckolded pregnant wife to one half of Gyllenhaal’s doppelganger duo, she is simultaneously fierce, ethereal, alluring, and heartbreaking, giving a mesmerizing performance reminiscent of Mia Farrow’s in Rosemary’s Baby and heralding the arrival of an undisputed new leading lady. Though honestly, would one expect anything less from a young woman whose been acting since she was a tween and who’s managed to capture the attention of one of the world’s greatest auteurs.
That would be her fellow Canuck, Oscar-Nominee David Cronenberg, a man whose films – including 1986’s The Fly, 1996’s Crash, and 2005’s A History of Violence – have captivated audiences by examining the seductively darker aspects of the human psyche. The director and the gorgeous blonde first worked together on the 2011 pic, A Dangerous Method, about the professional and personal rivalry between psychoanalysis pioneers Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), with Gadon starring as Jung’s dynamic if harried wife Emma.
Clearly she impressed Mr. Cronenberg, because not only has he cast her in every film he’s made since that one (she starred in his 2012 pic Cosmopolis opposite Robert Pattison and will appear again with the Twilight actor in the director’s upcoming Maps To the Stars) but he even introduced her to his son, Brandon – also a filmmaker – who cast her in his debut full-length feature, 2012’s Antiviral.
In fact, a talented Canadian blonde hasn’t infiltrated the moviemaking community up north so entirely since another Sarah, Ms. Sarah Polley first transitioned from child actor, to the school of Atom Egoyan, to Oscar Nominated writer/director extraordinaire. And with the year Gadon’s got coming up – including, in addition to Cronenberg’s latest, a role in the hotly anticipated Spider-Man Sequel, and one opposite Saoirse Ronan in Brooklyn, the latest film written by About A Boy scribe, Nick Hornby – it looks like world domination is only a matter of time.