A Perfect Enemy: A perfectly unsettling encounter with a stranger at the airport
By Jim Slotek
Rating: B
Remember when we traveled? Did you welcome social interaction with the people squeezed next to you? Or did you build a wall of isolation via noise-cancelling headphones and a movie or book?
I suspect most of us are among the latter. And we would most keenly feel the creepy violation of space that powers director Kike Maíllo’s surreal and suspenseful A Perfect Enemy, about a famous architect who makes the acquaintance of a relentlessly intrusive young female fellow traveler.
An overly-friendly stranger’s overtures turn sinister in A Perfect Enemy.
When we meet the Polish architect Jeremiasz Angust (Tomasz Kot), he is addressing a Paris conference audience about the conversion in his life that took him from designing monstrosities (like a terminal at Charles de Gaulle Airport) to taking ideas of form, function and simplicity and applying it to the lives of the needy in Africa. Apparently, 20 years earlier, his wife Isabella (Marta Nieto) had gone missing in Paris, and he’d abandoned the city, returned to Warsaw and reassessed his values.
His speech over, Jeremiasz is being driven in a heavy rain to the very terminal he designed, and stops to pick up a soaked young woman named Texel Textor (Athena Strates), who is – surprise! – also headed to the airport.
The aggressively, teasingly playful Texel morphs considerably in the unfolding of this 90-minute exercise in storytelling and contentious dialogue. She begins as a why-did-I-pick-her-up pain in the butt, talking relentlessly and, dismayingly, headed to the same VIP lounge as him, intent on continuing their so-far one-sided conversation.
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As a side note, he notices the encased model of the terminal he’d designed decades earlier, and what looks like a blood stain on the model floor. A portent if there ever was one.
Angered at his refusal to entertain her chatter, Texel offers to tell her a story about the two people she’d killed in her life (one of them involved wishing someone to death, another involved more directly lethal means).
I’d be looking for the door. But Jeremiasz is torn between fury at this deranged and insistent woman’s attention, and drawn to her odd philosophical ramblings about having “an inner enemy, a thousand times more powerful than God,” that compelled her to do the things she did.
Gradually, his reluctant participation in the conversation sees her story and his begin to dovetail, with Texel apparently privy to Jeremiasz’ own memories. A Perfect Enemy, taken from a novel by Amélie Nothomb, is a story about guilt so overpowering, it takes human form.
There is a twist to all this, though not a difficult one to spot coming. In A Perfect Enemy, Maíllo (best known for the 2011 sci-fi film Eva) painstakingly keeps the story on course to its visceral and disturbing conclusion, despite the very ground the characters walk on becoming less reliably real in the last act.
The two leads are a study in contrast. Strates is called upon to descend from annoyingly coy into madness, marked by a manic laugh that provokes shivers. Kot as the handsome professional, is a cypher, expressing little else but annoyance through most of the movie, despite his claim of spiritual epiphany. This unruffled exterior is a cover for what eventually emerges from him.
Other than the dramatized memories/stories, A Perfect Enemy is a minimalist film about two people talking, with increasing urgency. The last scene will stick with you.
A Perfect Enemy. Directed by Kike Maíllo. Starring Tomasz Kot, Athena Strates and Marta Nieto. Debuts Friday, June 11 on VOD/Digital.