‘Dual’ Review: Downer Dark Comedy Imagines the Pros and Cons of Being Cloned
23.01.2022 - 05:53
/ variety.com
Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticTurns out, it is easier to create a human clone than it is to destroy one. Or so goes writer-director Riley Stearns’ morbidly satirical, grimly absurd parallel version of the world as we know it.
In “Dual,” for those who have themselves copied, then change their minds for whatever reason, just one course of action exists: The original and his or her clone must face off in a televised death match. Whichever party survives the duel can now carry on as the one and only, unique version of the dittoed individual.If this sounds like a high-concept premise — or maybe just an elaborate excuse to deliver a high-concept pun — you don’t know the half of it.
Stearns, whose demented 2019 comedy “The Art of Self Defense” doubled as a critique of modern masculinity, isn’t particularly interested in taking the idea in the adrenaline-rush direction audiences might expect. Nor should “Dual” be mistaken for another “Swan Song,” the polite recent weepie in which Mahershala Ali plays a terminally ill husband who has himself cloned so that his wife might carry on without him.
“Dual” offers neither the genre-movie thrills nor the button-pushing catharsis of a conventional popcorn flick, but then, that’s what makes Stearns such an original storyteller. After a suitably intense opening scene, in which a dude (“Divergent” actor/action figure Theo James) duels … a remarkably similar-looking dude (also James) on a floodlit football field, audiences might reasonably expect an even more exciting showdown between Sarah (Karen Gillan) and Sarah’s Double (also Gillan).
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