Since crossing over from making tense psychological dramas in his native Canada to helming big-budget sci-fi epics for Hollywood studios, Denis Villeneuve has become one of the most widely celebrated filmmakers in the world. The director’s latest movie, an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal yet famously unadaptable novel Dune, has continued his impressive hot streak.
Stellan Skarsgård’s heavily made-up Dune villain Baron Vladimir Harkonnen has joined an interesting rogues’ gallery from Villeneuve’s films alongside the school shooter in Polytechnique and the serial child abductor in Prisoners.
7 Fausto Alarcón (Sicario)
Played to cold-hearted perfection by Julio Cedillo, Fausto Alarcón is the Mexican cartel boss that the FBI and the CIA team up to take down in Villeneuve’s ultraviolent crime thriller Sicario. Alarcón is responsible for a lot of heinous crimes, but perhaps the most heinous – and easily the most emotionally affecting – is what he did to Alejandro’s family.
A lot of characters in vengeance-driven movies have a murdered family, but Alarcón’s killing of Alejandro’s wife and daughter was particularly monstrous: he cut off his wife’s head and tossed his daughter into a vat of acid. Alejandro was so haunted by these actions that he left behind his career as a prosecutor and became a “sicario” (a government-appointed assassin) in order to seek revenge for it.
6 Anthony Claire (Enemy)
Jake Gyllenhaal anchors Villeneuve’s underappreciated psychological thriller Enemy with a captivating dual performance as two men who look exactly alike but have diametrically opposed personalities: one is timid and insecure, whereas the other is outgoing and aggressive. Adam, the protagonist, checks out a movie recommendation and finds that one of the actors, Anthony, who becomes the antagonist, is his uncanny doppelganger.
Anthony’s hot temper and sexual proclivities make him a villain throughout the movie. He stalks Adam’s girlfriend Mary and falsely accuses Adam of using his identical appearance to sleep with his wife so that he can “get even” by sleeping with Mary. This movie isn’t easy to interpret – some critics believed that Adam and Anthony aren’t really two people, but rather the Kafkaesque mental projections of a man who’s cheating on his pregnant wife and trying to justify it.
5 Holly Jones (Prisoners)
Villeneuve’s harrowing thriller Prisoners explores the dark lengths that a desperate father will go to when his daughter is abducted on Thanksgiving. For the majority of the movie, Paul Dano’s Alex is a top suspect, because he fits the profile and can’t articulate his innocence. The shocking twist reveals that Alex was himself abducted as a child by Holly Jones, a seemingly sweet lady played by Melissa Leo.
After this revelation, Holly explains that she and her late husband began abducting children as a sick hobby in a crusade against God for the death of their young son. Leo played the character’s friendly facade so well throughout the movie that this disturbing rug-pull lands spectacularly, and her portrayal of Holly’s true sinister nature is just as effective.
4 Niander Wallace (Blade Runner 2049)
Jared Leto gave an appropriately menacing turn as Niander Wallace, the main villain in Blade Runner 2049. His ominous goal is to find the child that Rick Deckard and Rachael conceived following their romance in the original movie, because he wants to prove that replicants can be a real biological species as opposed to just manufactured cyborgs.
The antagonist from the first Blade Runner movie – Roy Batty, played by Rutger Hauer – is one of the most iconic villains of all time, so there was no way the sequel’s villain could top him. But Leto did a great job with Wallace’s “god complex.”
3 The Killer (Polytechnique)
Before Villeneuve crossed over into helming Hollywood blockbusters, he directed the heart-wrenching true-life drama Polytechnique inspired by the infamous “Montreal Massacre.”
Villeneuve frames the real-world terror of a school shooting through the eyes of two students, played by Sebastien Huberdeau and Karine Vanasse. The school shooter himself – identified in the film only as “The Killer,” but overtly based on Marc Lépine – is particularly horrifying, because his motivation for murder is specifically his misogyny.
2 Alejandro Gillick (Sicario)
Alejandro Gillick, the lawyer-turned-assassin played by Benicio del Toro in Sicario, is more of an antihero than a straightforward villain. But his violent actions haunt Emily Blunt’s Agent Kate Macer enough that he could count as a bad guy. Josh Brolin’s CIA character Matt Graver makes some questionable moral decisions, but not as questionable as Alejandro forcing Kate at gunpoint to sign a statement claiming he acted legally (the irony being that this, in itself, is illegal).
Since Alejandro has suffered greatly at the hands of the cartel boss, his brutality feels somewhat justified. When he goes to the boss’ house and kills his entire family, it’s certainly shocking – but his desire to dole out eye-for-an-eye punishment is understandable.
1 Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Dune)
Villeneuve’s latest movie, based on the first half of Frank Herbert’s famously “unfilmable” sci-fi novel Dune, has been widely praised by critics. Like every other aspect of Herbert’s source material, Villeneuve did a great job of translating the book’s sinister villain – Vladimir Harkonnen, Baron of House Harkonnen – to the screen.
The visual artists nailed the character’s distinctive slug-like appearance, placing his aesthetic somewhere between Colonel Kurtz and Jabba the Hutt. Stellan Skarsgård complements that unsettling look by playing the role like a hulking, intimidating mob boss.
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