Characters grapple with questions of identity throughout Denis Villeneuve’s films, from Simone Prévost (Pascale Bussières) in Un 32 août sur terre (1998), who seeks to redefine herself after surviving a car crash, to Louise Banks (Amy Adams) in Arrival (2016), whose interactions with the alien Heptapods lead her not only to a new understanding of her future role as a mother, but to a whole new conception of being and time, to Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) in Dune (2021), who grapples with his potentiality as the Kwisatz Haderach of the Bene Gesserit and the Lisan al Gaib of the Fremen. In three films specifically – Incendies (2010), Enemy (2013) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) – the question of identity is underpinned by explorations of intersubjectivity, as it is the protagonists’ quests for knowledge of the Other that inevitably lead to a profound shift in understanding of the Self.

These physical and symbolic quests all originate in a desire to know who someone is. In Incendies, twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulain) and Simon Marwan (Maxim Gaudette) are sent to the unnamed native country of their deceased mother to find their brother and father; to their horror, they discover that their father is indeed the very son their mother failed to find years previously. In Enemy, Adam (Jake Gyllenhaal) first spies his presumed doppelgänger, Anthony (again, Jake Gyllenhaal), in a minor role in a film and pursues this mysterious actor through an alienating Toronto until he himself becomes the object of Anthony’s obsession; by the film’s conclusion, the double has disappeared, leaving Adam in a state of disarray as both subject and object of the quest. In BR 2049, K (Ryan Gosling) is instructed by his boss, Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright), to hunt down the lost (half) Replicant child2 of Rachael (Sean Young) and Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) through a deeply dystopic Los Angeles, San Diego and Las Vegas; K’s false belief that he himself is the miracle child whose existence may change the future for the Replicants and humans stems from his confusion of Ana Stelline’s (Carla Juri) implanted memories for his own and demonstrates a breakdown in his narrative identity or, in other words, in the stories he tells and is told about his life.