Mark Reviews Movies: DUAL

Dual, RLJE Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 14, 2022

If nothing else does, life will ultimately kill you. That's eventually the point and the punch line of writer/director Riley Stearns' Dual, which imagines an unspecified future in which cloning is relatively easy, if not entirely affordable, but has some significant stipulations to go along with it. A person has to be dying to have a clone of oneself made, but if a mistake has been made or a miraculous recovery has occurred, one of those people—the original or the double—has to die. There are probably easier, more humane, and less final ways to figure out that arrangement, but such legal and ethical concerns don't make for a catchy gimmick.

The gimmick here, established in an opening battle between a man and his clone, is that this society has determined a pretty cheap and, within certain circles, entertaining way to solve the potential problem of having two versions of the same person existing within it. If a dying person survives and the clone wants to remain alive, the original and the double engage in a court-ordered duel to the death. The victor gets to retain or take over that person's life, and everyone just goes on as if nothing has happened.

One can probably come up with a few questions and issues with this way of things, but since Stearns is mostly concerned with the dark humor of such a scenario going wrong, those aren't raised here for the most part. The movie works its way around the deeper and trickier aspects of this premise by turning everyone inside this story into a sort of emotion-free, unthinking robot.

In a way, that makes sense, since this kind of society—one that broadcasts duels, mostly between convicted murderers as a form of capital punishment, and imagines that getting past grief is as simple as having a clone slip into a dead person's life and uses a term like "decommission" as a euphemism for killing a clone—almost certainly would create such an apathetic attitude among its population. In another—and, in terms of actual drama and comedy and ideas being communicated, more important—way, Stearns' sterile and dispirited style gets in the way of the movie's story, humor, and point.

The protagonist is Sarah (Karen Gillan), who lives a sad and lonely life, despite all apparent evidence to the contrary. She lives with a long-term boyfriend named Peter (Beulah Koale), who's currently on a business trip and seems a little too quick to end the couple's nightly video calls to each other. For her part, Sarah stays in the apartment and drinks a lot of booze.

One morning, she wakes up in a pool of blood that she vomited in the night. A trip to the doctor reveals the worst, albeit to Peter, whom she accidentally put down as her primary contact: She has a rare, incurable, and fatal disease. Buying into the idea that it will make her death easier on Peter and her mother (Maija Paunio), Sarah decides to clone herself. The clone has a sunnier and more optimistic disposition, and within a matter of months, Double Sarah has become the girlfriend Peter always wanted and the daughter for whom Sarah's mother hoped.

All of this initial setup is quite funny, not only because of the cynically ironic setup, but also because of the actors' deadpan delivery and the emotional distance Stearns incorporates into the material. Once it turns out that Sarah isn't dying and that her clone is asserting her rights to have a chance at Sarah's life, the story's potential for ideas more or less runs dry, while that dry tone starts to feel repetitive and like a hindrance.

Basically, the original Sarah and Double Sarah will fight to the death in about a year (Meanwhile, the clone is dating Peter, and Sarah has to pay a sort of alimony to her double). The clone disappears from the story, and we follow Sarah as she trains with Trent (Aaron Paul), a discount combat specialist, for the forthcoming battle. His goal is to, not only teach Sarah how to fight, but also desensitize her to violence and death. Even though the training gives Sarah some sense of purpose, the fact that she—along with everyone else in the movie—has seemed and continues to seem desensitized to just about everything keeps the material and what is happening beneath it at an unfortunate distance.

The third act does raise some possibilities, including a support group for duel survivors and a battle of wits between the two Sarahs (Gillan, under Stearns' monotone direction, does little to distinguish the two characters she's playing). They arrive so late, after so much time separating the characters and focusing on a concept (the training and disassociation from violence) that seems only tangentially related to the movie's initial and final points, that Dual bypasses the ideas in its rush toward a shell game-style resolution. The punch line here does offer something to ponder, despite the shaggy nature of the joke building up to it.

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