A24
Sometimes , it ’s hard to account for the flight of a Hollywood career — to see the logic of a hitmaker ’s ascendent path from small to tremendous movie . What , for object lesson , did studio apartment executives notice in the kinky indie comedySafety Not Guaranteedthat convert them , mistakenly , that Colin Trevorrow was the right choice to take over theJurassic Parkfranchise ? Other times , the leap to the major make more sense . Just involve anyone who ’s been keeping up with the filmography of Denis Villeneuve , who once made French - Canadian art movies but now sits at the helm of the large multiplex outcome of the twelvemonth so far .
The rumbling bombast ofDune : Part Twodid not come out of nowhere . Rather , it represents a unfluctuating upscaling of its illusionist ’s vision — not a left round so much as the completion of an approach that ’s always lean turgid . Watch an early Villeneuve moving-picture show , like his Oscar - nominated , homegrown war dramaIncendies , and you could see telltale signs of an embryonic blockbuster sensibility , a muscular talent waiting to break into a new budget bracket and sprawl across the canvas of anIMAX screen . Duneis merely the good realization of what you could call his signature style : laborious with portent , roost on the ledge between action and horror , easy on the eyes , and serious as genus Cancer .
A24
Villeneuve ’s ocean trip to the domain of Hollywood heavyweight has been as incremental as the delivery of mythological expo in his Frank Herbert adaptations . That said , there is a major flection point on that spark . The key here and now of transition go far in 2013 , when the Quebecois director made his initial forays , plural form , into English - spoken language moviemaking . premier mere days aside ( and sort at the same film fete , Toronto),PrisonersandEnemywere about as different as you could reasonably anticipate two thrillers with the same director , principal , and unyieldingly boding atmosphere to be . But in their various ways , both inched Villeneuve closer to the big conference , with a vital help from their partake headliner , Jake Gyllenhaal .
Of the two , Prisonersis plainly the calling carte . Debuting at Telluride the week beforeEnemybut made a few months afterward , it found Villeneuve taking the Gavin Hood vocation way of life — that is , chasing an internationally acclaimed , socially “ crucial ” drama with a mainstream American thriller starring , yes , Jake Gyllenhaal . The actor plays a cop investigating the kidnapping of two small girls who evaporate down the street from their suburban Pennsylvania homes on Thanksgiving . While the police detective works the pillow slip by the book , one of the girls ’ fathers , play by an uncommonly intense Hugh Jackman , have matters into his own hand , snatching up the key suspect ( The Fabelmansstar Paul Dano ) and subjecting him to what is euphemistically bear on to as enhanced interrogation techniques .
By the time Jackman ’s Keller Dover has ramp up a makeshift Guantanamo Bay in a rundown business firm , it ’s percipient thatPrisonersfancies itself an fable . How far would you go , it asks , if it wasyourchildren ’s living at stakes ? Two age by and by , Villeneuve would square up ends against means again with his nightmarish , ethically muddy cartel thrillerSicario . Here , the script by futureRaised By Wolvescreator Aaron Guzikowski fashions a blunter moral quandary , with Dano putting an more and more prosthetically blot out boldness on the brute realities of anguish while the other girl ’s parents — played by Terrence Howard and Viola Davis — stand in for a complicit America , wringing their mitt on the by-line .
The film ’s conclusions about vigilante justice are vital but trivial . For all it blankets itself in a facing of slick artfulness and respectability , Prisonersis a potboiler at heart — one that indulge in a strange - danger fear - mongering not so unlike than the hysteria that drove the success of last summertime ’s culture - war sleeperSound of Freedom . ( No marvel this picture revel a second living on Netflix around the same time . ) In the grimly overcast earthly concern that Villeneuve portray , children are sitting ducks for depraved lunatics engage denotative state of war on God . The absurdities , improbableness , and cerise herrings ride slow until the film has all but collapsed under their weight .
ThatPrisonersis plenty gripping all the same has almost everything to do with how impeccably it ’s crafted . operate in the silky offense - yarn mode ofDavid Fincher — a petty scrap ofZodiac ’s adjective fixation , a lot of the ludicrous falling - Fats Domino pulpiness ofThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — Villeneuve envelops the audience in a mother wit of creeping menace and ruin so pervasive it ’s much visible . Right from the symbolically foreshadowing open shot of a cervid passing inadvertently into crosshairs , the film tighten its vice hairgrip of predatory voyeurism . Hallways give like erectile maws , beckon the characters into the darkness . A lonely flute courtesy of Jóhann Jóhannsson ’s sinister score sets a despairing tone , placing the outcome in a world hopelessly consumed by rot . As an elongated climate piece , Prisonerscasts an undeniable spell .
Gyllenhaal , too , is enjoyably prickly in a role that could have appear stock in other manus ; there ’s a sure faint levity in the exasperation that colors his police detective ’s brooding professionalism . It ’s a unspoiled operation than the one Jackman drive home , which is so vaguely seething from the start — beforethe kidskin go missing — that there ’s no jolt to Dover going fullZero Dark Thirty . Gyllenhaal , workmanlike as a workaholic cop , is also better inPrisonersthan he is inEnemy , delivering a duple functioning of sorts as a Toronto history professor who break he has an indistinguishable doppelgänger — a struggling , married actor with his face and voice , but not his more reserved disposition .
WhilePrisonersweaves an increasingly sophisticate web of plot of ground developments and shocking twisting , Enemydawdles drowsily through a simple psychodramatic scenario . It ’s a much different variety of enigma , reel the José Saramago novelThe Doubleinto a subconscious social function . However one chooses to literally excuse what ’s going on ( a disconnected personality seems plausible ) , Villeneuve is distinctly plumbing a shallow pond of intimate frustration , acting out a rather banal fantasy of a double life story . lay eyes on the fracturing mind of the domesticated man !
As inPrisoners , apprehension is the driving force . In fact , it ’s practically the whole show inEnemy , which hit one single note of sweaty unease — the noisome , quiet panic of shameful desires follow — for 90 identically inflected minute of arc . At least Villeneuve enlivens the doomy sleepwalk with some hunky-dory supernatural affectations , like a creepy nightmare and a truly inspired final jolt , that clarify the influence of a dissimilar David , the theatre director ’s revere fellow canuck and body - repugnance pioneerCronenberg .
Though it was made first , Enemyfeels like the sort of oddball passion labor a sleekly approachable ( albeit impossibly pessimistic ) thriller likePrisonersbuys . Neither recover Villeneuve at the height of his creative powers or instincts . They are , again , transitional films , bridge over his more resourceful , less extravagantly funded Canadian efforts to his current incumbency as Hollywood ’s chosen blockbuster auteur not namedChristopher Nolan .
But taken together , both suggest where Villeneuve would go next . In the human foot and car chases ofPrisoners , you’re able to see the fireball clarity of his filmmaking — how he ’d elevate Hollywood genre fare by rallying expert craftspeople around it . ( This is his first movie with the heavy cameraman Roger Deakins , who ’d germinate Villeneuve ’s similarly ruthlessSicarioand go on to finally win an Oscar lensing hisBlade Runner 2049).Enemy , meanwhile , found motifs that would cover further in the sci - fi work to which he ’s commit the last few years of his career . Are n’t the abstract arachnid vision of this more supposedly “ personal ” moving-picture show a precursor to the tentacled alien species of his best movie , Arrival , or that briefly - glimpse , fetish - monster spider woman inDune ?
Both films demonstrate that Villeneuve could indefinitely rag an atmosphere of impending doom . They ’re threatening front to back , never deviate from a patina of thicken anxiousness . Some might call that “ one - note , ” and perchance they ’d be right . But it ’s a note this theatre director bring with accomplishment and holds with great restraint , whether he ’s sending it bounce off the moldering wallpaper of a Middle American home or resound across the desert of an alien planet .
