10 Movies That Aren't About What You Think

Denis Villeneuve's 2013 psychological thriller Enemy follows a college professor, Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal), who learns that he has a doppelganger - an actor named Anthony Claire (also Gyllenhaal, obviously).

What follows is a deeply bizarre and intoxicating mystery-thriller largely concerned with identity and sense of self, but it's also secretly about something else entirely - male fear of commitment.

Spiders are a recurring visual motif throughout the film, culminating of course in the terrifying final visage of Adam staring down a gigantic tarantula which has suddenly replaced "his" wife Helen (Sarah Gadon). Rather than recoil in fear, though, Adam simply stares at the spider with disinterest, even boredom. 

Of the many fascinating interpretations of the film and its ending, the most widely accepted reading is that the spiders represent a fear of intimacy and romantic commitment. After all, it's clear that both Adam and Anthony aren't entirely happy in their relationships, indicated by their eventual pursuit of each other's partners with fatal consequences.

At film's end when Adam has assumed Anthony's life, including living with an unknowing Helen, her sudden transformation into a spider indicates his innate revulsion to domesticity, that he already views her as a mere obstacle to him living a "free" life.