The Enemy (2011)

directed by Dejan Zečević

Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia

108 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I mostly watched this because I thought it would be a horror film, and I like the idea of Serbia being known for a different horror movie than "A Serbian Film", as well as Croatia and Bosnia being known for... well, any horror movie at all, really. As it turns out this is much less of a horror movie than I thought it was, and I don't really know what genre I'd personally consider it. I just considered it good.

So the film is set during the final days of the Balkan War, and the characters are all doing the grueling job of clearing mines while bunking in a burnt-out ruin that's too cramped for their number. Everyone is rife with cynicism and doubt about the new "peace" that's suddenly been declared; they all have seen too much to believe that everything the war has done can be undone simply by telling people not to fight anymore. This is not a war movie- it doesn't focus entirely on combat or the experience of being a soldier or death or anything like that, but at the same time it can't be divorced from its wartime setting. It doesn't take war lightly at all but it also doesn't bombard us with needless visuals of suffering. The film was made by people who actually do live and work in the region it's set in, and I've seen some other folks from the area praising it for realism and for being a rare depiction of the Balkans that wasn't made by someone who's never been there. It doesn't get too heavily into ideology, that's not its purview, but I think it does a good job of showing the toll of hate.

The title of the film is a reference to the character who is kind of the centerpiece of it: A man who the soldiers find bricked up behind a wall. He's unruffled, claims to not be cold, hungry, or thirsty, and never reveals anything real about himself, only ever asking for cigarettes, and not even those once he sees there's not enough to go around. His inscrutable presence causes a deep rift to form between the soldiers, and soon they start infighting viciously as their circumstances grow more mysterious and the theories about who the man in the wall is grow wilder. Coincidentally, I just watched another film that involves a very similar mysterious person who refuses to give up information about their identity ("Cure" by Kiyoshi Kurosawa) and so I feel like I have a little bit more of a framework with which to talk about The Enemy. I have seen a few films that follow this general premise: An interloper arrives, and without directly inciting violence, causes chaos among everyone near them. Whether intentional or not, the presence of an outsider who refuses to concede to ideas of kin or creed or class infuriates the people who meet him- who is he, if he won't define himself according to our ways? And who are we, if we cannot define him?

After a while, the soldiers start to toss around theories that this mystery man is either God or Satan. He never refutes either idea himself, but again, this causes deep tension and fear anyway. One of the more philosophically-inclined of the men introduces the concept of solipsism, the idea that maybe this is the only man who really exists. Kill him and everything else disappears. I really love the subtle way all of this is handled, and maybe it was even too subtle- there's so much focus on infighting and prejudice that the story of the man from the wall feels underdeveloped even for something that's intended to be underdeveloped- but the way he's played and the way he never acts to prove or disprove anything made him feel genuinely menacing. I don't know if I have a pet theory about who he was; I don't know if I was supposed to come away from this film with one interpretation or another, but if the maxim goes that Hell is other people, then the man in the wall would certainly qualify as the king of it. He brings everybody into hell by pitting them against people who were once, if not their friends, then at least people they consider to be on the same side of the war. This was a fascinating film and I would love to see it get more recognition internationally.