The influence of the Greeks “weird wave,” and to a lesser extent the moral mazes of Austria’s Michael Haneke, have been seeping into U.S. indie cinema for quite a while now, and Riley Stearns’ third feature, Dual, comfortably fits into the Sundance slot taken last year by Pascual Sisto’s bizarre dysfunctional family satire John and The Hole.
Stearns doesn’t quite nail the macabre mundanity of absurdist classics such as Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster — in which the residents of a drab seaside spa hotel must find a soulmate within 45 days or be turned into an animal — but he gives it a good shot, drawing a surprisingly committed performance from Karen Gillan in the kind of role usually earmarked for Aubrey Plaza in her spiky Ingrid Goes West mode.
Sundance Film Festival U.S.A.’s opening sequence Dramatic Competition entry DualThe tone is set, though a bit clumsily. A normal Joe in sneakers, jeans, and a grey hoodie stands at a football pitch. A foldaway table gives him several options: an axe and shears, a crossbow, a combat knives, a crossbow, and a mallet. While he chooses, a TV camera tracks him. His opponent shoots first, drawing gasps from the audience and light applause. The start of a fierce fight to the end. After being pierced with arrows, the man grabs a knife and charges his assailant, causing a wild stabbing spree. Strangely, the killer and victim are actually the same man: Robert Michaels. He was apparently killed by his own lookalike.
“The double has won the duel,”Note the deadpan referee. “He’s Robert Michaels now.” The pun is a little on the nose, but Stearns isn’t overly interested in subtlety: this is a film about duality and dueling, and it’s based upon questions of identity and mortality.
Sarah (Gillan) will soon be confronted with these questions when she meets us for the first time. With her impending death due to a mysterious and virulent illness, Sarah (Gillan) has two options. One, she can arrange her funeral, or invest in a second to learn her thoughts, habits, and mannerisms. The second will allow her to take control of her entire life.
Sarah chooses the double, but when her illness just as mysteriously goes into remission, she finds there’s no way back. By now, her double — an exact duplicate, except for the color of her eyes — has made herself comfortable in Sarah’s life and has no intention of leaving it. Worse still, Sarah’s husband and domineering mother prefer the new her. A duel has been set for the two of them to resolve the matter. Sarah must also continue to pay the installments for her indignant replica.
It’s a dark premise, so dark that it takes a while to register as a comedy — although it’s pretty clear by the time Sarah creates her double by simply spitting into a test tube — and there’s an oddness that’s hard to pinpoint. The shoot might have contributed to some of the strangeness, with Tampere, Finland, doubleing for Anywhere U.S.A and some very stilted performances (a generous reading could suggest that there are multiples all over, cleverly taking over from originals).
Once it is in its stride, however, DualIt can be quite entertaining, especially when Sarah hires Trent (Aaron Paul), a survivalist to help her prepare for the big fight. Trent toughens her up with a regime that includes a visit to an autopsy room — one of the films queasier moments — but Sarah risks going broke in the process, confessing to him: “Between the personal combat training, clone support and hip-hop dance classes, money has been a little tight recently.”
For the most part, the other Sarah exists largely off-screen, which adds to the brutality of the comedy as Sarah starts to realize that she is becoming surplus to requirements, an idea road-tested in Christopher Waitt’s brilliant 2005 short DupeA very funny twist on the old fable The Sorcerer’s Apprentice in which a stoner skater dude duplicates himself to a point where he’s made redundant from his own life.
Though it doesn’t always work, DualDoes, at the very least, justify extending this idea to feature length. It culminates in a surprisingly powerful payoff that Gillan has a rare opportunity for to show her range of emotional and difficult women forced to fight literally for their lives.