Editor’s Note: This review originally ran as part of our coverage of the virtual 2022 Sundance Film Festival. With the film’s wider release this week, we’ve republished the review. Check out all our coverage from Sundance here, and check out our full archives of past festivals.
If there’s one truly disappointing aspect inherent in the way that virtual festivals operate (beyond, you know, the whole “impact on local economics” thing), it’s the impact that the lack of an audience has on a comedy. There’s a communal element to watching a truly funny movie that is impossible to replicate at home, no matter how many of your friends and family members are gathered in a single space, because you’re dealing with a fully random mixture of people: One person’s infectious laugh can improve the quality of an entire film and it can stimulate your sense of humor and sharpen it as well: you hear someone laugh at something like The Lighthouse, an intentionally funny movie cloaked in the garb of serious surrealism, and you can realize that, yes, that is an appropriate reaction to have. Case in point: Riley Stearns’ Dual, a very funny sci-fi film that is essentially Swan Song if Mahershala Ali was required by law to kill his double in order to reclaim his family and his life. It’s anchored by a brilliantly comic dual performance by Karen Gillan, putting the awkward stylings of her performance in James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies to good use in service of Stearns’ awkward bluntness, which is similar in function to how it was applied in his last feature, The Art of Self-Defense.
That Swan Song comparison is incredibly accurate up to a point, as well: Following a cold open in which we witness a young man dodge crossbow bolts on a high school gridiron only to brutally murder his double at the other end of the field, we’re introduced to Sarah (Gillan), an alcoholic with an anesthetized soul, whose only relationships are fully strained by distance and/or awkwardness. Her boyfriend (Beluah Kohle) is on a long trip to London, and her mother (Majia Paunio) is overbearing, and she mostly just gets drunk and watches porn in her spare time — until, that is, she starts puking up blood. Her doctor tells her that there’s a 98 percent chance that she’ll be dead within six months, and recommends that she purchase a “replacement,” a cloned double who will take over her role in the lives of those closest to her so that they don’t have to bear with the loss. She decides to do it, after all, and, soon enough, she’s taking home Other Sarah (Gillan), who has all of her features but none of her baggage. Months pass, and Other Sarah has colonized Sarah’s life: her boyfriend and mother like the clone more, and she’s just basically waiting to die so that she can just be over with all of it. Yet there’s a slight problem: Sarah’s condition has gone into total remission.
As you might expect, she attempts to “terminate” the clone by legal means, but Other Sarah fights back similarly, challenging her to a state-sanctioned duel where the two of them have to duke it out in order to claim the mantle of “Sarah.” It’ll take place in a year, during which time the pair will have to train for mortal combat, which will be public and televised. In the meantime, she’ll still have to pay the loan that she took out to pay for Other Sarah, clone “support,” and whatever legal fees will come up along the way, as well as whatever training that she’ll need in order to get the job done. It’s in this spirit that Sarah hires Trent (Aaron Paul), an expert on dueling who also has some pretty ridiculous views on how to prepare someone to kill their exact duplicate. This training makes up much of the movie, with Paul and Gillan attempting to out-awkward one another in the most ridiculous ways, such as Paul attempting to suggest to her that he could take “alternative forms of payment” for their arrangement (which are not what they sound like) or their elaborate staging of duel combat in slow-motion, talking out the wounds and the amount of blood pouring out of them while still trying to score another possible hit, as if they were twelve-year-olds trying to one-up each other for the victory.
Stearns’ world is a stiff and drab dystopia, befitting the kind of blunt cruelty inherent to this kind of system, and although it isn’t wholly unique, it may be more interesting than you think. One of my biggest regrets in reviewing The Art of Self-Defense back when I saw it at SXSW in 2019 is that I used the qualifier “Lanthimosian” to describe it, and I genuinely don’t know if that was fair to Stearns, who uses a kind of dry-yet-absurd approach to black comedy which has existed long before Yorgos ever captured a frame to film, especially when they’re attempting to pair it with a kind of dystopian aesthetic — think Lester’s The Bed-Sitting Room, or Greenaway’s The Falls, or the more humorous elements of THX 1138 — which speaks to a kind of recency bias that is just sort of disappointing for me to revisit. It turns a deliberate aesthetic choice, obviously tailored to the themes of this specific story, into a mere game of copy-and-paste, and it’s just kind of boring to leave it at that instead of attempting to question the why of it.
Self-Defense worked because the faux-gravitas with which these self-serious assholes regarded themselves was revealed to be the awkwardness it always had been, and Dual’s style works because the entire film hinges on one central emotional reaction in the final minutes, which is both humorously and pitifully performed to perfection by Gillan, which puts the rest of the film into stark relief. I wouldn’t dare to suggest that Stearns has equaled some of his prior work here — Faults still being one of the best single-location indies of the past decade — but Dual‘s an amusing venture into actualized metaphor, where the id and super-ego are forced to duke it out in gladiatorial combat to satisfy the ego.