The caustic sci-fi movie Dual sets up the smallest, strangest clone war

The caustic sci-fi movie Dual sets up the smallest, strangest clone war

This review was originally written in collaboration with Doublefrom at the 2022 Sundance International Film Festival.
Over the course of three widely spaced feature films — Defaults, The art of self defenseand the new Double – writer-director Riley Stearns has slowly revealed himself as a confrontational filmmaker, but only when framed in the calmest, most intense terms. There’s not a lot of screaming or fighting in his films. But the quivering desire to scream and fight is always just below the surface for its determined characters. They were clearly not cut out for violence, but they often wish they were – or pretend to be. Everyone in these movies seems overwhelmed by the conflicts that have gripped them, and everyone is trying to figure out how to win, but no one wants to be Rude about that.
In Double, this dynamic is accompanied for the first time by elements of science fiction. The opening scene makes it clear that the film’s title, no pun intended, has a double meaning. In this world, cloning is easy and almost instantaneous, and terminally ill people are encouraged to clone themselves — “So your loved ones don’t have to suffer your loss,” according to one ad. But because clones are meant to take on the identities of their progenitors, if circumstances change and the original cell donor doesn’t die, they must duel their clone to the death to see which one is wrong. between them continues to exist.
This premise is absurd on a thousand levels, but Stearns leans straight into the absurdity, especially with this ad for the cloning service, which features a deadpan storyline where a depressed man clones himself so he can kill himself in peace. without making his family. members suffer. This kind of brutally caustic humor defines the film. Anyone who doesn’t see themselves laughing at least a little at the grim prospect of a new clone calmly encountering the corpse of their ancestor and taking their place would be asked to stay away.

Photo: RLJE Films
Stearns channels absurdism through Sarah (guardians of the galaxy‘s Karen Gillan), a prickly young woman who is amazed to learn that she has an incurable fatal disease and only months to live. The doctor who announces the news is surprised at Sarah’s calmness: “Most people cry when doctors give them bad news, that’s why most doctors are depressed,” she tells her patient. But Sarah’s withdrawal is mostly disbelief. She feels fine, apart from the occasional tendency to spit up large drops of blood. Nevertheless, she decides to take the clone route. The expense puts her off at first, but the clone advisor she talks to gives her the Riley Stearns equivalent of a hard sell: the completely blunt and flat statement, “You need to understand this is a gift for your loved ones. . Can you put a price on the fact that they don’t have to be sad? »
As it happens, not only are her boyfriend and mother not visibly sad at the news of Sarah’s impending death, they like the clone better than they like him. And when, inevitably, Sarah’s irreversible illness miraculously reverses and she realizes she’s going to live, her family shuts her out and embraces the clone instead. His only hope is to win his public duel against the clone-Sarah (also played by Gillan, naturally, in a remarkably fluid game black orphan-dual-role style), which means learning to fight, while also learning to accept responsibility for murdering someone who looks exactly like him.
In a moment suddenly filled with multiverse stories exploring alternate narrative routes for familiar stories and bringing together different versions of specific characters, Double oddly reads like a scaled-down version of the same idea, where Sarah has to come to terms with her failures by seeing how successful she could have been had she made different choices. But it also fits nicely into the world of horror stories about evil opposites, where a character comes to value their life more when an alternate version of themselves comes to steal it. The familiar message about gratitude for life sounds surprisingly sour in Doublehowever, considering how little warmth or personal support Sarah sees in this life prior to the clone’s arrival.
This is largely due to Doublestray from reality, a form of stylization that was easily his most controversial and controversial choice. Stearns drags his actors to a deadpan, rigid level of delivery that seems inhuman, where almost every line is a flat statement that highlights surrealism in an already surreal setting. Another film could achieve horror and melodrama in Sarah’s impending death and replacement. It could also rely more on how her dystopian world seems designed specifically to torment her, with laws that make her financially responsible for supporting the clone that supplants her and plotting to assassinate him in this heavily heralded duel sanctioned by the state. Instead, Stearns presents it all in the most pragmatic way possible, which sometimes makes it harder to empathize with Sarah, or sees her as more of a person than her intriguing clone.

Photo: RLJE Films
Stearns employed much of the same tone in The art of self defense, which has goofy nebbish Casey (Jesse Eisenberg) seeking martial arts training from a comedic macho sensei (Alessandro Nivola) after an assault. This plot gets a parallel in Double when Sarah connects with combat trainer Trent (breaking Bad‘s Aaron Paul) hoping to toughen up for the duel. Either way, Stearns extracts a lot of extremely dry humor from both the students’ gullibility and willingness to go along with anything, and the teachers’ ridiculously specific and improbable training methods. (Sensei forces Casey to stop petting his dog, as it made him sweet; Trent forces Sarah to watch gory movies, noting that they’re not very good, but at least they’re very gory.) Either way, part of the comedy The fact that the actors perform with such earnest sincerity and little tonal effect is that they never seem to be trying to sell the audience on the reality of their unreal situations and beliefs.
All of which makes Stearns’ films funnier, but not necessarily more engaging. Self Defense Art is more overtly comedy, poking fun at the contrived and self-defeating aspects that people so often bring to their ideas of masculinity. But Double plays with tougher subject matter and more sensitive emotions, and the aloof, mannered approach doesn’t always serve the characters well. Viewers can be left trying to inject their own sense of emotional hurt and threat into the story, even though Sarah is openly in pain and her life is constantly on the line. A single scene where she breaks down in tears in his car – which Gillan plays with heartbreaking conviction – does more to make the character seem human and relatable than almost the entire combined runtime of the film.
And the ending makes it especially hard to take Double like even a dark and macabre comedy. It highlights the film’s cynicism about everything – about the capitalist structures that push Sarah to resolve her own mortality by buying something to replace it, about the family and personal relationships that give her so few options, about the a society that considers her to be replaceable, on the negligible value of the life she has built for herself. It’s a weird and memorable movie with a unique voice and a unique perspective, and that alone is worth seeking out. But just as Stearns’ characters seem to constantly suppress a cry of dismay, despair, or defiance, viewers can get out of this one by suppressing the urge to go yell at Stearns and demand satisfaction that the film is not. not about to offer.
Double opens in theaters on April 15 and will be streaming on AMC Plus and available for digital rental and on-demand on May 20.

#caustic #scifi #movie #Dual #sets #smallest #strangest #clone #war

The caustic sci-fi movie Dual sets up the smallest, strangest clone war

This review was originally written in collaboration with Doublefrom at the 2022 Sundance International Film Festival.
Over the course of three widely spaced feature films — Defaults, The art of self defenseand the new Double – writer-director Riley Stearns has slowly revealed himself as a confrontational filmmaker, but only when framed in the calmest, most intense terms. There’s not a lot of screaming or fighting in his films. But the quivering desire to scream and fight is always just below the surface for its determined characters. They were clearly not cut out for violence, but they often wish they were – or pretend to be. Everyone in these movies seems overwhelmed by the conflicts that have gripped them, and everyone is trying to figure out how to win, but no one wants to be Rude about that.
In Double, this dynamic is accompanied for the first time by elements of science fiction. The opening scene makes it clear that the film’s title, no pun intended, has a double meaning. In this world, cloning is easy and almost instantaneous, and terminally ill people are encouraged to clone themselves — “So your loved ones don’t have to suffer your loss,” according to one ad. But because clones are meant to take on the identities of their progenitors, if circumstances change and the original cell donor doesn’t die, they must duel their clone to the death to see which one is wrong. between them continues to exist.
This premise is absurd on a thousand levels, but Stearns leans straight into the absurdity, especially with this ad for the cloning service, which features a deadpan storyline where a depressed man clones himself so he can kill himself in peace. without making his family. members suffer. This kind of brutally caustic humor defines the film. Anyone who doesn’t see themselves laughing at least a little at the grim prospect of a new clone calmly encountering the corpse of their ancestor and taking their place would be asked to stay away.

Photo: RLJE Films
Stearns channels absurdism through Sarah (guardians of the galaxy‘s Karen Gillan), a prickly young woman who is amazed to learn that she has an incurable fatal disease and only months to live. The doctor who announces the news is surprised at Sarah’s calmness: “Most people cry when doctors give them bad news, that’s why most doctors are depressed,” she tells her patient. But Sarah’s withdrawal is mostly disbelief. She feels fine, apart from the occasional tendency to spit up large drops of blood. Nevertheless, she decides to take the clone route. The expense puts her off at first, but the clone advisor she talks to gives her the Riley Stearns equivalent of a hard sell: the completely blunt and flat statement, “You need to understand this is a gift for your loved ones. . Can you put a price on the fact that they don’t have to be sad? »
As it happens, not only are her boyfriend and mother not visibly sad at the news of Sarah’s impending death, they like the clone better than they like him. And when, inevitably, Sarah’s irreversible illness miraculously reverses and she realizes she’s going to live, her family shuts her out and embraces the clone instead. His only hope is to win his public duel against the clone-Sarah (also played by Gillan, naturally, in a remarkably fluid game black orphan-dual-role style), which means learning to fight, while also learning to accept responsibility for murdering someone who looks exactly like him.
In a moment suddenly filled with multiverse stories exploring alternate narrative routes for familiar stories and bringing together different versions of specific characters, Double oddly reads like a scaled-down version of the same idea, where Sarah has to come to terms with her failures by seeing how successful she could have been had she made different choices. But it also fits nicely into the world of horror stories about evil opposites, where a character comes to value their life more when an alternate version of themselves comes to steal it. The familiar message about gratitude for life sounds surprisingly sour in Doublehowever, considering how little warmth or personal support Sarah sees in this life prior to the clone’s arrival.
This is largely due to Doublestray from reality, a form of stylization that was easily his most controversial and controversial choice. Stearns drags his actors to a deadpan, rigid level of delivery that seems inhuman, where almost every line is a flat statement that highlights surrealism in an already surreal setting. Another film could achieve horror and melodrama in Sarah’s impending death and replacement. It could also rely more on how her dystopian world seems designed specifically to torment her, with laws that make her financially responsible for supporting the clone that supplants her and plotting to assassinate him in this heavily heralded duel sanctioned by the state. Instead, Stearns presents it all in the most pragmatic way possible, which sometimes makes it harder to empathize with Sarah, or sees her as more of a person than her intriguing clone.

Photo: RLJE Films
Stearns employed much of the same tone in The art of self defense, which has goofy nebbish Casey (Jesse Eisenberg) seeking martial arts training from a comedic macho sensei (Alessandro Nivola) after an assault. This plot gets a parallel in Double when Sarah connects with combat trainer Trent (breaking Bad‘s Aaron Paul) hoping to toughen up for the duel. Either way, Stearns extracts a lot of extremely dry humor from both the students’ gullibility and willingness to go along with anything, and the teachers’ ridiculously specific and improbable training methods. (Sensei forces Casey to stop petting his dog, as it made him sweet; Trent forces Sarah to watch gory movies, noting that they’re not very good, but at least they’re very gory.) Either way, part of the comedy The fact that the actors perform with such earnest sincerity and little tonal effect is that they never seem to be trying to sell the audience on the reality of their unreal situations and beliefs.
All of which makes Stearns’ films funnier, but not necessarily more engaging. Self Defense Art is more overtly comedy, poking fun at the contrived and self-defeating aspects that people so often bring to their ideas of masculinity. But Double plays with tougher subject matter and more sensitive emotions, and the aloof, mannered approach doesn’t always serve the characters well. Viewers can be left trying to inject their own sense of emotional hurt and threat into the story, even though Sarah is openly in pain and her life is constantly on the line. A single scene where she breaks down in tears in his car – which Gillan plays with heartbreaking conviction – does more to make the character seem human and relatable than almost the entire combined runtime of the film.
And the ending makes it especially hard to take Double like even a dark and macabre comedy. It highlights the film’s cynicism about everything – about the capitalist structures that push Sarah to resolve her own mortality by buying something to replace it, about the family and personal relationships that give her so few options, about the a society that considers her to be replaceable, on the negligible value of the life she has built for herself. It’s a weird and memorable movie with a unique voice and a unique perspective, and that alone is worth seeking out. But just as Stearns’ characters seem to constantly suppress a cry of dismay, despair, or defiance, viewers can get out of this one by suppressing the urge to go yell at Stearns and demand satisfaction that the film is not. not about to offer.
Double opens in theaters on April 15 and will be streaming on AMC Plus and available for digital rental and on-demand on May 20.

#caustic #scifi #movie #Dual #sets #smallest #strangest #clone #war