Dual (2022)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Karen Gillan leads with not one but two of her best performances yet in the aptly titled Dual, a satirical science fiction thriller that was released under just about every radar last year. The Doctor Who, Jumanji, MCU, and Oculus actress plays Sarah, a depressed young woman who prefers isolation to engaging with her pestering mother and emotionally distant boyfriend. One wonders if this is a chicken-or-egg situation, and if Sarah has driven them away or vice versa. Suddenly stricken with a terminal (and gory) illness, Sarah keeps her condition a secret while she explores her options. She elects a somewhat experimental and sensational path forward: to create a clone of herself to live on after her own death, to protect her loved ones from the pain of losing her.

The world of Dual is very realistic, one that could generally be our own world, except for this cloning technology. The "replacement" process is touted as a loving practice for family and friends, one that is minimally invasive (apparently the clone is created almost instantly from only a drop of your saliva) and requires only some time with the original to learn mannerisms, facts and details, and personality traits. The transition from original to replacement is supposed to be seamless and heartwarming. Of course, that's not the case, as sometimes the original survives the terminal diagnosis. By this point, the clone has generally become a full person and doesn't want to be "decommissioned"; when this happens, the two identical people are made to duel to the death. 

Hence the title, which plays off both the dual nature of Sarah and the duel she needs to prepare for with her clone. Because her replacement, from their introduction, has no interest in copying Sarah. She's assertive, challenging, and independent; her different eye color is suggested by a clone technician immediately to be a "glitch," though he has no idea how deep the glitch goes. The clone is more confident, more sexual, more assertive, more fun; Sarah's mother and boyfriend both prefer the clone, and so Sarah finds herself a stranger in her own life. So Sarah, miraculously cured from her terminal illness, decides to duel her clone. Over the course of one year, she trains rigorously (under a combat trainer named Aaron Paul, which is hilarious to me) to prepare to survive and reclaim her life.

Interesting thoughts that are suggested but never quite explored litter this film, such as the offhanded remark that Sarah doesn't need to worry about paying for her replacement because the clone, as the survivor, will be billed. Every time the film starts to suggest intrigue around the anxiety-inducing uncanny implications of having another version of yourself running around messing up your life, it shies away from even smart conversations about it. It's not a fault of the director or actors, but of the screenplay, which is almost exclusively interested in Sarah's process of training for the duel and then, of course, the outcome of that confrontation. Ordinarily, big ideas like this -- talk about a life debt -- deserve more consideration and time, but Dual is so lean and mean in its incisive look at the psychology of the two Sarahs that it doesn't need to dwell on more cerebral, existential themes. Can you fault it for being what it is, even though it could have been far more interesting, even based on its title, which in retrospect should have been titled Duel?

Then again, in enduring all the unsatisfying blank spaces that this film creates, one wonders if we're meant to feel as liminal as the central characters. The "double" concept has been used extensively throughout cinema, notably from Hitchcock and Roeg and De Palma, and has even featured in several recent movies, such as Infinity Pool just this year. Perhaps it's a theme that will resurrect in the wake of Covid-19, the kind of dual consciousness not of race or ethnicity but of a trauma response to having very different public and private personae.