By Seth Lukas Hynes
Dual
Starring Karen Gillan, Karen Gillan and Aaron Paul
Rated M
3/5
Dual is a sadly insubstantial sci-fi satire.
Sarah (Karen Gillan), a terminally ill woman, has herself cloned to spare her family the pain of losing her, but when she unexpectedly recovers, Sarah must duel her double to the death.
Dual has an intriguing first act, with a short but tense action opener and efficient exposition establishing Sarah’s illness, the rules of cloning and the rights of the clone. Sarah and Sarah’s Double have amusing adversarial interplay, as the Double usurps Sarah’s life and proves the more popular of the two. Sarah forms a macabre but endearing friendship with her combat trainer Trent (Aaron Paul). The world-building is subtle and has some clever dark touches, such as Sarah using hip-hop dancing classes to get fit for a death-match and paying alimony-like support payments to her Double, and the climax has a well-executed twist.
But beyond the subversive wit, Dual feels sparse and even tedious.
Dual’s pacing somehow feels both uneventful and rushed, brushing over Sarah’s financial troubles and skipping nearly a year of her training with little fanfare, and the performances are witheringly dry. There is an art to delivering an engaging low-key performance (take Daniel Kaluuya in Nope), and dry delivery can throw dark themes into sharper relief, but Dual’s stiff, deadpan acting and extremely descriptive dialogue feel very artificial.
For a superior film about a usurping doppelganger, watch Richard Ayoade’s 2013 dark comedy The Double, and for a more suspenseful, inventive satire about a dystopia with a specific quirk, watch Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2015 film The Lobster.
Funny for the first act but burdened by flat pacing and dehydrated acting, Dual is available to rent and purchase from iTunes.
