Dual was reviewed out of the Sundance Film Festival, where it made its world premiere.
Conceptually, Dual may seem familiar. Its story, of people coming face-to-face with clones meant to replace them, resembles recent shows like Netflix’s Living With Yourself and an episode of Amazon’s Solos, which reflect an increasing anxiety about mortality in a digital world, where identity is no longer contained by the physical self. However, writer-director Riley Stearns approaches the idea with a bleakly funny tone, which helps him zero in on the relationship drama at its center. It follows a woman named Sara (Karen Gillan) who, after learning she has a terminal illness, commissions the creation of a genetic twin to keep her mother (Maija Paunio) and her boyfriend Peter (Beulah Koale) from grieving her loss. Things get complicated — to say the least — when Sara decides that the clone, who has begun taking over her life, is no longer required.
What exactly happens in this scenario? The film actually provides a very explicit answer in its prologue, in which we see a man and his carbon copy engaged in a televised, legally mandated, Hunger Games-esque duel to the death (the title is a cheeky pun). However, despite this action-packed opening scene, Dual is intentionally withholding in its exploration of Sara. Her speech is stilted and formal when she video chats with Peter. She feels plucked right out of a Yorgos Lanthimos film (her intention is clear, even if her inflection doesn’t match), and whenever she masturbates to porn, it feels like a mechanical routine. She may as well be one of the many newly minted clones learning to walk in other people’s shoes. Even when she decides to clone herself and teach her copy how to live her life — a process known as “Replacement” — her mannerisms and decision-making feel as if they’re on autopilot. One has to wonder whether her diagnosis comes as something of a relief.
Dual’s visual fabric reflects Sara’s distance from other people, and from herself. The frame is often dulled. Its palette is drab and the camera rarely moves. Gillan is mostly captured in isolated shots, so she’s tasked with walking a fine line as an actress: a deadpan stillness, but one that also manages to draw the eye and create intrigue. The secret, it would seem, lies in her delivery of dialogue, which is so precisely calculated as to feel absurd, but the few times she lets slip even an ounce of passion or opinion are downright guffaw-inducing. It’s like watching a robot learning to be briefly and imperfectly human.
As her own copy, named “Sara’s double” while Sara is alive — after which she’ll just be “Sara” — Gillan paints with a similar brush. However, she adds just a dash of life and flavor, enough that the difference between the two characters is visible on some occasions (they have different eye colors, but the muted palette often helps obscure this detail). As Sara’s double begins to learn her routine, the way Gillan gazes at this new version of herself draws a number of key themes to the surface. Sara feels replaced of course, but in a manner that reveals a deep and subdued pain underscoring the film’s black comedy. After a while, it begins to resemble a break-up drama, rife with raw nerves and exposed insecurities, as Sara witnesses her boyfriend in the arms of someone new.
However, given its cloning conceit, it simultaneously reflects emotional dissociation, and feeling at a remove from your own experiences, as if the shattering news of impending death (and, in this case, a crumbling relationship) has led to Sara watching her own life from a distance, in third person. What’s more, the resigned longing with which Sara observes her new (and she fears, improved) version can’t help but also play like a fantastical idealization of the person she wishes she could be — which is to say, a person at all.
Gillan’s performance is matched by a similar uncanniness all around Sara, stemming partially from the specifics of the production. Where the story actually takes place is something of a mystery; it appears to have been written with American locations in mind as well as American characters, all of whom have American names, and all of whom speak with American idioms and pronunciations. However, due to the ongoing pandemic, it was filmed entirely in the city of Tampere, Finland. Gillan and Koale — a Scott and a Kiwi respectively — play Americans, but their accents seem intentionally and forcefully over-enunciated (as if they were ESL teachers), while the characters around them, played mostly by Finnish actors, speak English either with their native inflections, or with American accents half-attempted. This happens to work to the advantage of the story’s “as I’m sure you already know” school of clunky exposition, because the result is a world that doesn’t quite sit right on the tongue. It feels dislodged from reality whenever Sara interacts with it.
The dour hilarity of the first half doesn’t fully carry over to the second, which mostly follows Sara training with an intensely matter-of-fact combat and weapons instructor (Aaron Paul) in preparation for her duel, but these scenes have enough momentum to be entertaining. They’re bolstered by an engaging emotional turn, which sees Sara — who was once resigned to her fate — now desperately wanting to survive, as if out of spite towards her replacement, who seems to make her mother and her boyfriend happier than she did. However, this is also followed by the film temporarily stepping away from its strongest elements, when a potential reconciliation veers Sara off her collision course with herself. It begins to introduce new ideas that speak to what the psychological and emotional fallout of this strange experience might be, but it also turns away from these ideas just as quickly. Then again, that Dual temporarily feels at a remove from itself, while in search of some greater meaning it never finds, is also oddly fitting.
With an appropriately overbearing score produced by Emma Ruth Rundle, who fills the soundscape with electric wailing that often borders on white noise, the film is, at its best, a deft aestheticization of depression, with occasional glimmers of surrealness that prove dazzlingly uproarious. The modest latter half takes a few dragged-out turns that are far more plot-heavy than the first, but even these seemingly literal directions are eventually justified, as they allow Dual to loop back around to an even more uncanny version of its premise.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/3nOkhu6
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