I watched Enemy the movie unfold like most people with a sense of what is going on? The movie takes a beating kind of rhythm to get there before the revelatory end. I've read some of the psycho intellectual interpretations below and kudos to the authors for deciphering the basic plot. I however cannot put this into a ' masterpiece' class. There are too many holes. The film starts with a recorded telephone message from Mother. And another later on. Contained in these messages is the key to the truth, explained in detail by the plot theorists below. However what hasn't been explained and isn't by anybody is that Mother during her second phone message says thank you for letting me visit your apartment and how could you live in that? This doesn't support the thesis that the doppelgängers are relally the same but divided person. If the reality is Helen and Adam and their life, they live in an elegant and quite classy though sterile apartment. This does not fit with mothers message. Her remarks about the apartment seem to be referring to the empty bachelor nest which is dark and depressing and belong to the invented bachelor part of the lead character. How does mother get access to the invented part of her sons life? I think this is what confused me as I was on the schitso track till then. Still good there are good performances, though I found the script clunky and indulged in the nowadays popular script device- the extended and nauseatingly long dialogue 'pause' which frustrated this viewer. A lot of contemporary directors favour 'the pause' . You'd never see Hitchcock or De Palmer reach for this pseudo intellectual arty device.