Double Check: In a small, strange clone war, a woman goes up against her duplicate

This review was originally written in connection with dual‘s release at the 2022 Sundance International Film Festival.

Over the course of three widely separated feature films – Mistake, The art of self defenseand the new dual — Writer and Director Riley Stearns has slowly emerged as a filmmaker who focuses on confrontation, but only when it is formulated in the softest and most intense terms. There’s not a lot of yelling or fighting in his films. But the smoldering desire to scream and fight is always just beneath the surface for its single-minded characters. They’re clearly not made for violence, but they often wish they were — or pretend they were. Everyone in these films seems to be overwhelmed by the conflicts that have gripped them and everyone is trying to figure out how to win, but no one wants to be not polite about it.

In dual, this dynamic comes with science fiction elements for the first time. The opening scene makes it clear that the film’s title, no pun intended, has a double meaning. In this world, cloning is easy and almost instantaneous, and terminally ill people are encouraged to clone themselves – “so that your loved ones don’t have to suffer the loss of you,” reads one ad. But because clones are destined to take on the identities of their ancestors, if circumstances change and the original cell donor doesn’t die, they must duel their clone to the death to see which of them survives.

This premise is absurd on a thousand levels, but Stearns leans squarely into absurdity, particularly with this ad for the cloning service, which depicts a dead-end scenario in which a depressed man clones himself so he can commit suicide in peace, without his Injuring family members suffer. This kind of brutally biting humor characterizes the film. For those who can’t imagine laughing at least a little at the grim prospect of a new clone quietly bumping into its ancestor’s corpse and taking its place, stay away.

Stearns channels absurdism through Sarah (Guardians of the Galaxy‘s Karen Gillan), a prickly young woman who is amazed to learn that she is suffering from a deadly disease with no cure and has just months to live. The doctor who breaks the news is surprised by Sarah’s calmness: “Most people cry when doctors give them bad news, so most doctors are depressed,” she tells her patient. But Sarah’s removal is mostly disbelief. She feels fine, except for the occasional tendency to cough up large fountains of blood. Nevertheless, she decides to go the clone route. The cost puts her off at first, but the clone consultant she speaks to gives her the Riley Stearns equivalent of a hard sell: the completely blunt, flat-voiced statement, “You must understand that this is a gift for loved ones.” is . Can you name a price for not having to be sad?”

Coincidentally, not only are her boyfriend and mother not overly saddened by the news of Sarah’s impending death, they even like the clone more than she does. And when Sarah’s irreversible illness inevitably miraculously reverses and she realizes she will survive, her family shuts her out and embraces the clone instead. Her only hope is to win her public duel against clone Sarah (also played by Gillan, of course in a remarkably smooth orphan black-style dual role), which means learning how to fight while learning to take the responsibility of assassinating someone who looks exactly like her.

In a moment that’s suddenly filled with multiverse stories that explore alternate narratives for familiar stories and bring together different versions of certain characters, dual oddly reads like a scaled down version of the same idea, in which Sarah has to face her mistakes by seeing how successful she would have been had she made different choices. But it also fits well into the world of horror stories about evil opposites, where a character values ​​their life more when an alternate version of themselves shows up to steal it. The familiar message of being grateful for life feels surprisingly sour dual

considering how little warmth or personal support Sarah sees in this life before the clone shows up.

This is mainly because duals peculiar detachment from reality, a form of stylization that was easily his most controversial and divisive choice. Stearns coaches his actors to a level of dead, rigid performance that feels inhuman, where almost every line is a flat statement that highlights surrealism in an already surreal setting. Another film could reach for the horror and melodrama in Sarah’s imminent death and replacement. It could also draw more heavily on how their dystopian world seems specifically designed to torment them, with laws making them financially responsible for supporting the clone who is supplanting them and planning to state them in this heavily implied state assassinate sanctioned duel. Instead, Stearns presents all of this in as factual a manner as possible, which at times makes it harder to empathize with Sarah or see her as a person rather than her scheming clone.

Stearns used essentially the same tone The art of self defense, in which the clumsy Nebbish Casey (Jesse Eisenberg) seeks martial arts training from a macho comedic sensei (Alessandro Nivola) after being mugged. This storyline gets a parallel dual when Sarah connects with fight trainer Trent (breaking Bad

‘s Aaron Paul) hoping to harden up for the duel. In both cases, Stearns draws much extremely dry humor from both the students’ gullibility and willingness to go along with anything, and the teachers’ ridiculously specific and unlikely training methods. (Sensei gets Casey to stop petting his dog because it has made him soft; Trent has Sarah watch gory movies, noting that they’re not very good, but at least they’re very gory.) In both cases, part of the comedy cast with such passionate sincerity and so little tonal affect is that they never seem to try to sell the audience the reality of their unreal situations and beliefs.

All of this makes Stearn’s films funnier, but not necessarily more engaging. art of self defense is more of a comedy that pokes fun at the artificial and self-destructive aspects that people so often bring into their notions of masculinity. but dual plays with more difficult subjects and more sensitive emotions, and the detached, mannered approach doesn’t always benefit the characters. Viewers may have to try to bring their own sense of emotional pain and threat into the story, even though Sarah is openly suffering and her life is constantly at stake. A single scene of her breaking into tears in her car — which Gillan plays with heartbreaking conviction — does more to make the character human and relatable than the film’s overall running time.

And the ending makes it extra hard to take dual than even a dark, macabre comedy. It underscores the film’s cynicism about everything — about the capitalist structures that push Sarah to solve her own mortality by buying something to replace it, about the family and personal relationships that leave her with so few options , about the society that thinks she’s replaceable, about the negligible value of the life she’s built. It’s a strange and memorable film with a unique voice and perspective, and that alone makes it worth seeking out. But just as Stearns’ characters seem to constantly stifle a cry of dismay, despair, or defiance, viewers can come out of it and quell the urge to yell at Stearns and demand a satisfaction the film won’t provide.

dual opens in theaters April 15 and will stream on AMC Plus and be available for digital and on-demand rentals on May 20.