Dual Review: Even When It’s Treading Water, Riley Stearns’s Survival Comedy Is Hilarious

With Dual, writer-director Riley Stearns takes a concept ready made for a blockbuster sci-fi spectacle and dials it down to a level of extreme deadpan minimalism. In a drab-looking near-future that looks just like a drab-looking present, a woman named Sarah (Karen Gillan) is diagnosed with a mysterious illness and given a matter of weeks to live. In order to diminish the imminent grief of her friends and family, she enters the “Replacement” program, which produces a clone that Sarah can then teach how to live on in her place. But when her diagnosis is reversed and the clone refuses to be decommissioned, Sarah is forced to participate in a court-ordered duel to the death with her double.

Stearns draws this scenario, where the severe laws of this world are indistinctly enforced but never explained or justified, with Kafkaesque absurdity. When Sarah initially asks why the duel is necessary, the straight-faced response she gets from her doctor (Sanna-June Hyde) is, “Well, we can’t have two of you walking around out there. That would be ridiculous.”

The mechanics of the duel itself, which we glimpse in the opening scene as a man named Robert Michaels (Theo James) faces off against his own double, is equally ridiculous. Taking place on a run-of-the-mill sports field in a public park, the two Roberts begin on opposite ends, each with a table full of weapons at their disposal. A cameraman and an announcer are present to televise the events, yet there’s little accompanying fanfare to the proceedings, which is attended by a smattering of locals who watch indifferently from the bleachers.

Fans of Stearns’s previous work will recognize this drollness immediately, as it’s a tone that has clear roots in the austere satires of Yorgos Lanthimos; Alps, with its tale of actors taking over the positions of recently deceased loved ones, feels like an especially deliberate point of inspiration. In his prior two features, Faults and The Art of Self-Defense, Stearns has proven himself deft at using this oddball aesthetic to illustrate disturbing truths about brainwashing and toxic masculine culture, respectively, and in Dual he attempts to probe some absorbing ideas about personal identity in a similarly anonymous and uncaring society.

At first, Dual hits upon the sharp anxiety of watching from the sidelines as life moves on without you. Sarah begins the film as a layabout, resulting in her double quickly upstaging her by changing her habits and style. When the double easily woos back Sarah’s previously dissatisfied husband, Peter (Beulah Koale), Sarah’s sense of regret increases while the “improved” version of herself thrives in her place. And even though Sarah more or less wears the same mask of impassive stoicism throughout, Gillan still sells the existential dread of her condition by suffusing every deliberately stilted line read with a subtle sense of despair.

But the haunting nuance that initially characterizes the film’s premise starts to dim once Sarah enlists an eccentric trainer, Trent (Aaron Paul), to help her prepare for her deathmatch with her clone. Trent helps Sarah become a hardened warrior proficient in all kinds of weaponry, and as repayment for the lessons Sarah teaches Trent a hip-hop dance routine set to Lil Jon’s “Get Low,” a scene that’s indicative of the film’s many pleasantly quirky diversions. But while Gillan and Paul have a charmingly offbeat chemistry, the comedy here begins to seemingly exist solely for the sake of disposable laughs, while the narrative becomes somewhat of a retread of the self-improvement storyline from The Art of Self-Defense.

Whereas Stearns’s previous features arrive at forceful climaxes, Dual shambles toward the finish line. The intense focus on the build-up to the duel turns out to be a bit of a bait and switch. Instead of a potent final gut punch, we get an abruptly prankish denouement that comes off more like a result of Stearns’s premise writing him into a corner. Which isn’t to say that the director doesn’t keep staging some visually hilarious gags as the film winds down, particularly in a shot of Sarah hysterically limping toward the site of the duel. The moment is a triumph of durational comedy, and proof of the film’s ability to consistently tickle the funny bone, even when it comes at the expense of psychological nuance.