Like fellow Quebecer Jean-Marc Vallée, feted for The Dallas Buyers Club, ambitious director Denis Villeneuve has moved permanently onto the stage of international cinema.

Born in Trois-Rivières almost 47 years ago, Villeneuve traded an early interest in science for filmmaking, starting with tough stuff like his breakthrough Maelström and the docudrama Polytechnique. With 2010’s Mideast-themed Incendies, he broke out of the French-speaking world. In last year’s Prisoners, he took the crime genre into an extra-dark place.

Now, with Enemy, opening Friday (March 14), he puts Prisoners detective Jake Gyllenhaal through another set of paces, in a dual role as an indecisive history teacher who encounters an actor who looks exactly like him.

“Actually, we did Enemy first,” explains the director, calling from Toronto. “I was amazed that Jake agreed to do this small Canadian film, but this was where we built the trust to do Prisoners.”

Adapted from a novel by Portugal’s José Saramago (Blindness), Enemy’s script is by Javier Gullón, a Spaniard who has since written the Canadian The Boy Who Smelled Like Fish. Here, Toronto plays Toronto—a big part of the appeal for these Latinate filmmakers.

“We were very much aware of being in the playground of David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan,” Villeneuve says of the Anglo colleagues responsible for Spider and Speaking Parts, which touched on more-than-similar themes. The Montrealer also says the novelty of working in English has already worn off.

“I understand almost everything, despite the fact that I have the most ’orrible accent you have ever heard,” he adds with a laugh. Enemy riffs on the roles that actors (and teachers) serve in the social construct, as projections of imagination and identity. But Villeneuve is also interested in characters that are less symbolic.

“If there are 20 people on a bus, they will all have such interesting stories. I’m just trying to get around to as many as I can.”