Kike Maíllo

(On Cable TV, November 2022) As I’ve mentioned a few times (and will keep mentioning), I’ve had it up to there with so-called psychological dramas that think that protagonists working their way through past trauma are a great excuse to feature imaginary characters, nonsensical reality shifts and voluntarily incoherent storytelling technique. There’s a rug-pulling aspect to those movies that gets increasingly grating when it’s not done well, and it comes with a complementary tall order of “Why should I care when none of this is real?”  A Perfect Enemy makes things even harder for itself by not being particularly good at bringing viewers inside its hermetic madness. From the get-go, there’s something noticeably off with the dialogue between a middle-aged architect and a rebellious young woman: the style is stilted, in a showy and self-congratulatory way that can’t be explained by the film’s European origins. The actions of the characters don’t make sense, and their antagonist relationship is so strident as to defy explanation as to why he should stay close to her even despite the hardship that she carelessly imposes upon him. It arguably gets worse as the building blocks of the imaginary construction are put together—the past trauma that he’s revisiting, the nature of the fictional construct creating the “dialogue” here. In the end, A Perfect Enemy becomes noticeable in its exasperating subgenre by taking a much darker conclusion—one that allows delusions to remain intact and trauma to be once again sealed out of sight. It’s not enough for writer-director Kike Maíllo to distinguish himself in the crowded subgenre—a limp middle section doesn’t help the mild loathing for the characters, although a stylish crescendo of a conclusion brings a bit of much-needed style to shore up the wobbly substance. I probably would have been more impressed by A Perfect Enemy in pre-Fight Club 1997—but it’s twenty-five years later, and these days some movies have more imaginary characters than real ones.