Lots of interesting theories here, and I appreciate the effort, but ultimately this film comes off as an entirely futile exercise in intentional crypticism. Some of the best puzzle films have degrees of narrative obfuscation on par with this film's--
Innocence,
L'Annulaire,
Mulholland Dr,
Upstream Color-- but with those the proposed theories or personal explanations were able to be read and worn comfortably by the film we all see. Here, nothing fits well, and it's because the film has removed or confused some crucial step of the process in its efforts to be inscrutable. I
don't think the mark of a great film is its ability to generate a wide swath of interpretations-- I'll take
one reading that fits over a dozen that don't. And the film itself is so underwhelming, to steal the apt term from earlier in the thread, that it barely invites as close a look as it's receiving here.
As far as what's left to appreciate in the piss-colored goings-on, I thought Jake Gyllenhaal did a good job with his dual roles, especially the awkward pauses and hesitancy of his associate professor (though he does such a good job that it becomes utterly impossible to accept the myriad readings of the film which attempt to reconcile both characters as the same person). And Sarah Gadon does even better work playing the only identifiably human person in the mix. Melanie Laurent however is utterly wasted here and I have no idea why she even signed on-- perhaps some early, possibly more conventional version of this script gave her more to do? The recurrent spider imagery seemed cheaper and cheaper with each iteration (leading to that desperate-feeling finale), and I do have to chuckle at some of the incredulous responses questioning the crush fetish club's existence-- have y'all never seen
SVU (or that episode of
the Practice where Henry Winkler played a much more sinister doc than the one he plays on
Parks and Recreation)? Overall, I'd be willing to reevaluate it upwards if I could be convinced this was anything more than a slick but ultimately rather juvenile attempt at making an insta-cult classic.
EDIT: And just because the thread could use more windmill tilting,
here's another interesting but not quite there reading of the film as an anti-dictatorship parable, which like all of these theories does make sense if you just ignore a bunch of the other stuff that happens in the film