The Essentials: The Films Of Denis Villeneuve

“Prisoners” (2013)
It feels safe to say that “Prisoners” marks the juncture at which point Villeneuve graduates from acclaim in arthouse/cinephile circles and into the big leagues of prestige studio filmmaking. Granted, this slick potboiler is every bit as tense and agonizing as “Polytechnique” or “Incendies,” but it’s also cast with bonafide movie stars, and positively drips with the kind of sumptuous, expensive capital-M movie atmosphere that only a studio like Warner Bros. can buy. Taking a page from David Fincher’s “Se7en” and other like-minded, grisly murder procedurals, Villeneuve turns what could be a beach-read mystery into a study of godless reckoning the American suburbs. Over the course of the film’s chilling narrative, a child goes missing, an investigation is launched into an abduction, a family comes apart at the seams, and ordinary working people are pushed to unthinkable spiritual extremes. “Prisoners” is, as you could imagine, an ugly and at times punishing film to sit through, but it’s also one of the best-acted dramas of 2013, featuring galvanizing work from Hugh Jackman and Maria Bello, an insidiously creepy Paul Dano, and a twitchy, caustically funny, career-best Jake Gyllenhaal.

“Enemy” (2013)
Imagine, if you will, that you are a depressed, sexually frustrated academic living in modern-day Toronto. Then, imagine that, one day, you rent a videotape (remember those?) and are shocked to see your exact doppelganger lingering as an extra, a bellhop, in one throwaway frame. That’s the deliciously wicked premise for “Enemy,” Villeneuve’s most confounding nightmare to date, which updates the mirroring-double perversity of something like David Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers” as an actor’s showcase for Jake Gyllenhaal, returning from “Prisoners,” to give two of his most outrageously entertaining performances to date. The legacy of Canada’s master of body horror looms large over “Enemy,” to the point where the film is occasionally held back from greatness by Villeneuve’s reliance on pastiche, tips of the hat weirdo geniuses like Cronenberg, Lynch, and Brian De Palma. The doom has never been amplified anywhere in Villeneuve’s filmography more than it is in “Enemy,” though the film is immersed in a sinuous kinkiness that prevents it from ever leaning into glum self-parody. It doesn’t hurt that “Enemy” contains two of Gyllenhaal’s most dialed-in performances, though the actor is well-served by co-stars Sarah Gadon, Melanie Laurent, and Isabella Rossellini. And how about that final shot?

“Sicario” (2015)
Villeneuve took his technical storytelling chops to a new level with the taut and blistering “Sicario,” a borderland thriller and thoroughly pessimistic morality tale that festers with more than a touch of the existential rot that has come to define Michael Mann’s canonical work over the years. Emily Blunt gives a lead performance that is utterly engrossing in its tactical restraint, playing Kate Macer, an FBI agent trapped in a growing quagmire of ethical and legal corruption that extends to both her smarmy CIA superior (Josh Brolin) as well as their lethal, enigmatic guide through the less tourist-friendly parts of Mexico, Alejandro (an unforgettable Benicio Del Toro). Adapting an airtight thriller script penned by a then-ascendant Taylor Sheridan, Villeneuve fills this adrenalized milieu with haunting, even ghostly images – a cartel stash house where corpses line the insides of the walls, dead bodies hanging like a grim warning sign from a bridge in Juarez – that evoke not only shades of the Western and neo-noir genres, but also the empty futility of the American War On Drugs itself, and our culture’s unwitting, docile complicity in it.

“Arrival” (2006)
Villeneuve has been accused in some circles of being a cerebral, somewhat cold filmmaker, but that is certainly not a criticism that applies to the auteur’s shimmering sci-fi allegory “Arrival,” which still stands as the director’s most emotionally mature motion picture to date. “Arrival” also marks a fascinating point of artistic transition for Villeneuve, as he begins to pivot away from the gloomy, mid-budget, crime/thriller/mystery films he had been making shortly before this, and towards epic, serious-minded blockbuster science fiction. Based on Ted Chiang’s 1998 novella “Story Of Your Life,” “Arrival” features one of Amy Adams’ loveliest and most graceful performances as Louise Banks, a grieving linguist who come to act as a critical human catalyst for communicating with a host of visiting extraterrestrial life forms stationed at various points around the globe. With the aid of Bradford Young’s rapturous and otherworldly images and the incandescent, heavenly score by Jóhann Jóhannsson, “Arrival” went on to be nominated for eight Academy Awards (winning only one, for sound editing), and gross over $100 million at the domestic box office. We’d argue its acclaim is well deserved.