In his last two films Denis Villenueve, the director of Sicario, has developed a fascination with the limits of luminescence. In Prisoners, Villenueve's last film (while Enemy was released after Prisoners it was actually made first), a search party combs the woods at night, looking for two missing girls. Filmed from above the light of their flashlights forms small circles with discrete borders. In Villenueve's world light doesn't taper off into darkness, it slams into it like a brick wall. The search for knowledge in this world is always curtailed by the hard limits of the unknowable.
