A Perfect Enemy

A Paris-based architect, Jeremiasz Angust, heads to a Paris airport after a successful conference in the city. On his way, he meets a strange girl who asks for a lift to the same location. Texel Textor is a blonde teenage girl whose blunder costs Angust to miss his flight. Later it is revealed that the Paris airport was designed by him some 20 years ago. At the same time, his wife, Isabelle, went missing, and he has been waiting for her since then. Thus, the location refreshes some memory.

Angust waits in the VIP lounge for the next flight to Warsaw when Texel turns up again. Annoyingly, she compels Angust to join him for a conversation and ends up telling him grisly stories of her childhood. One of them holds a murder mystery that disgusts Angust at first but also hooks his attention. At the first meeting with Angust, Texel introduced herself as a Dutch woman headed to the Paris airport. In the second encounter, she started narrating the stories of her dark childhood and how she killed her classmate by just praying. Later, she ran off to Paris to live a life away from her family. In Paris, she saw an exquisite woman at Montmartre Cemetery and became obsessed with her. For 2 whole years, she hunted down the beautiful woman. And when her pursuit came to an end, she confessed her love to the woman, but she rejected it. Finally, in remorse and revenge, she killed the woman. The woman’s name was Isabelle, Angust’s wife, who went missing.

Angust got tormented. He couldn’t believe it because he was the one who killed Isabelle. So who was this strange woman?Texel Textor is Angust’s inner conscience or often referred to as the “inner enemy,” in the novel and in the film. He killed his wife out of fear of losing her but later found out through a pregnancy strip in the bathroom that Isabelle was pregnant. Angust created an image of his daughter and named it Texel Textor. She often labeled herself as Dutch because Isabelle was leaving for Amsterdam before Angust killed her. He wanted to believe that his daughter would have been born in Amsterdam as a Dutch woman if he hadn’t committed the crime. (the Netherlands as a whole is called a Dutch Country).

In simple words, Texel wasn’t real but was an invisible conscience created out of guilt or remorse. Angust was simply revisiting his guilty past through another face.The airport showcased in the film was designed by Angust, 20 years ago when Isabelle was alive. When he revisited the airport at the present time, he saw a bloodstain on the miniature model of the airport. Its significance is that after killing Isabelle, Angust dumped her body in a Concrete mix outside the construction area of the expansion airport. 20 years later, his mind played games with him and reminded him of the crime he committed.

The airport was Isabelle’s tomb that can’t be penetrated.All three stories were true, but it never happened with Texel. They were actually snippets of Angust’s conflicted past. From childhood, Angust had been afraid of failure. He was a narcissist who couldn’t accept criticism. (A layer that can be pinpointed on deleting the negative comment on his blog that dealt with his conference feedback).

The Narcissistic personality disorder started in his school days when Angust killed his best friend Frank Hoffman and made him disappear without a clue. The story is similar to Texel’s story, who killed her classmate by praying for her death.Like Texel’s incidents, Angust ran away from home and came to Paris to start anew. In Montmartre Cemetery, he saw Isabelle and got obsessed with her. But unlike Texel’s version, Angust wooed Isabelle and married her. But later, she felt captive (she mentioned Stockholm syndrome to Texel in the third story). When Isabelle decided to leave Angust, his sense of perfection and narcissism got hurt. So he killed Isabelle and called his actions “A Perfect Crime.” Why? Because Angust believed in his most narcissistic sense, that if a criminal is still free, then his crimes are the most perfect in nature.Finally, Angust and his inner enemy, Texel, came face to face on the airplane. Angust, in pain, confessed to killing the most loved one in the world. He demanded Texel, his conscience, kill him for his crimes and free him of his guilt. Texel tries to bury Angust in a concrete mix that visually appears in the airplane bathroom.

But soon, his narcissism took over again. He came out from the “hallucination” concrete and grabbed Texel’s neck. He killed Texel and buried her in the concrete. The way he buried his wife. In simple words, Angust killed his inner enemy, his inner consciousness, his daughter Texel. But why did Texel come back in the first place? Because Angust was in remorse for killing his unborn child.

[1]

The film is a Spanish-German-French co-production by Sábado Películas, Barry Films, The Project, and Hessen-Invest Film.[2]

The film was presented at the 53rd Sitges Film Festival on 16 October 2020.[2][5] It was released on Filmin streaming on 29 January 2021, reportedly becoming the largest release on the platform up to that date.[6]

According to the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, A Perfect Enemy has a 86% approval rating based on 14 reviews from critics, with an average rating of 6.0/10.[7]

Phil Hoad of The Guardian rated the film 3 out of 5 stars, deeming it to be a "well-written, devious Euro-thriller".[3]

Sergio F. Pinilla of Cinemanía rated the film 3 out of 5 stars, considering that the story "works", with the viewer feeling "trapped in the waiting room of that airport, at the mercy of the lurking and morbid tales of a stranger", summing up the film as a "psychothriller that relates perfection with (self-)destruction".[8]

• List of Spanish films of 2021

• A Perfect Enemy at ICAA's Catálogo de Cinespañol