Sarah (Karen Gillan) is a woman waiting for life to happen. She isn’t living, never mind thriving, but merely existing. Her long-term boyfriend Peter (Beulah Koale) has been away on assignment for too long. The couple maintains a daily video chat routine as if out of obligation. She has been dodging her mother’s calls for weeks. She has that going-through-the-motions shut-in energy St. Vincent describes in Birth in Reverse. “Oh, what an ordinary day. Take out the garbage. Masturbate.” It happens to many of us. We put off living, waiting for some magical change to take us out of our rut. Life happens regardless of our participation — as Sarah cruelly finds out when her entire life is hijacked by her clone in the absurdist satire, Dual.
The cold discomfort of Riley Stearns’ previous feature The Art of Self-Defense is extended into a dystopia where arbitrary laws are enforced at deadly costs to identity. The dark humour forever threatens to tilt into horror, as Stearns pushes his existentially underprepared characters into the most disorienting circumstances, and lets natural selection do its work. The characters may seem like they have been beamed in from another world, which is meant to reflect our own through a warped lens.
Diagnosed with a rare terminal illness, Sarah does what is standard practice in Stearns’ bizarro world. She buys a clone to replace her, hoping to spare her boyfriend and mother the grief. With the time she has presumably left, she helps the clone settle into her life. Sarah Double, as she is called, learns how to be Sarah and more with an endless curiosity, enquiring about Peter’s preferred sex positions and promising to love her mom more than she did. Except when Sarah makes a miraculous recovery, she finds out she can’t just go back to her old life. The law demands the two Sarahs must duel to the death to decide who is the one true Sarah.
The precise nature of how the country descended into enforcing such state-sanctioned duels is left purposefully vague. The unexplained aspects leave the film open for reading your meaning into it. The company which offers the cloning service is simply referred to as “the Facility” — to suggest the willing hand Big Business plays in social control. That the duels are broadcast as live events reinforces how the ruling class keeps the masses from confronting the greater injustices they face by distracting them with entertainment. It’s reality TV taken to a terrifying extreme to show it for what it is: not about reality, but about ignoring it.
The duel between the Sarahs is set to take place in a year. Making a bad situation worse for Sarah is Peter and her mom taking Sarah Double’s side, booting her from her own family and home. Here’s the kicker: Having survived, she must continue paying off the monthly payments on her clone by herself. To win the duel and reclaim her life, Sarah trains with combat expert Trent (Aaron Paul). He teaches her how to handle every kind of weapon, and turn her own body into one. Watching violent movies and visiting actual autopsies desensitise her to the violence and death, and prepare her for the reality of her circumstances.
Gillan fits right into this world where everyone speaks with a monotone matter-of-factness and a clinical detachment. Sarah is in a situation that you would think would warrant the extremes of human emotion. But the detachment turns her into a canvas to project what our reactions would be in the same situation. By drawing back the performances, Stearns is drawing us forward to find the truth of his characters. Isolating a character’s action from the emotion that drives it helps us understand why we do what we do. The camera fittingly hangs back at a remove, hesitant to engage.
Out of this emotionless endeavour emerges an odd but intriguing film. The prologue sets the tone. It’s night. The floodlights are on across a football field. A man (Theo James) has a variety of weapons spread out across the table, but he seems almost shellshocked like this isn’t happening. His challenger at the other end isn’t and fires the first arrow from a crossbow. The man waves his hand as if to declare a truce, only to be shot in the arm. Coming to terms with how this can only end one way, he picks up a knife, charges at his challenger while he loads his crossbow, and brutally stabs him to death. The crowd cheers. The man, crowned the victor, is double.
This world of illogic is drawn out to its logical ends. At moments, Stearns can get too hung up on his quirks, which some may find off-putting. There is also a cut-and-dried quality to how he executes his premise, instead of letting it play out organically. Like he has already drawn out his inferences before rendering the allegory on film, and his thesis statement was self-fulfilling.
Though Dual is hardly a faultless film, it still whets our appetite for whatever absurd film Stearns dreams up next. There is a lot to like about his unique brand of dark comedies even if you don’t fully buy into his style or worldview. In how easily the double-takes over Sarah’s life is an identifiable horror of how replaceable we are. The double, being new to the world, has a curiosity and a greater appreciation for it. Only when faced with the prospect of death does Sarah come to appreciate it too, buoyed by a renewed will to live. As the cliche goes, it takes losing something for us to care about it.
Dual had its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. It was an official selection of the US Dramatic Competition.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru.
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