by Jason Adams
I suppose it's less of a theoretical question now than it was a few decades ago, but what would it mean for us if human cloning becomes a reality? It's a topic science-fiction has wrestled with for ages, but having just spent two years weathering my first global pandemic by basically Netflix-and-chilling it I'm prone to think our grand high sci-fi authors might've overblown our reactions to such epochal events. (I mean... we barely reacted to that news about UFOs, for god's sake.) And so I'm now prone to believe that human cloning would be met with something closer to the meh, shrug, move-on that The Art of Self-Defense director Riley Stearns' crafts with his slyly mundane sci-fi parable Dual, just premiering at Sundance...
That said the shrugs and Lanthimosian indifference that plague the colorless strip-mall world of Sarah (Karen Gillan) do seem like their own sort of righteous reaction to the knowledge that humanity can be drive-thru replicated if you just spit into a test tube and go grab lunch for an hour. Wouldn't that rug-pull regarding our specialness instill a sort of lethargic torpor in you too? It doesn't seem that far off from how we've actually greeted most of the world's great technological achievements -- we're excited for a day and then we're slapping our magical pocket computers that are beyond anything our grandparents could have ever imagined dully against our dashboards if they skitter a bit while playing a multi-million-dollar movie spectacle at four inches square.
So when Sarah wakes up one morning to find blood on her pillow, sprayed out from her face in a crimson butterfly wing pattern, she doesn't get too excited. She strips and washes the sheets and eventually makes her way to the hospital, where in the middle of telling the nurse at the counter that it isn't an emergency she impassively pukes up some more blood. I bet you didn't think it was possible to impassively puke up blood, but you'd be wrong, and this is just the movie to prove it. Sarah's doctor tells her she's got a rare stomach disease that will with 100% certainty kill her (give or take a two percent margin of error) but hey, spit in this tube and we can double you so your friends and family don't have to be too sad. A version of you will live on forever!
Which, after the world's briefest consideration (involving a very goofy instructional video), Sarah agrees to. They spend more time talking about repayment options than they do anything else, which gifts the film a good jab at modern-day credit debt incurment -- how exciting for loan lenders, to keep getting paid even after the loanee's death! And so just like that, one and half glasses of soda pop later, Sarah has her double. She takes her home and begins teaching Sarah 2.0 everything about herself, so the double can play her to the best of her abilities once Sarah's shuffled, ever so disinterestedly, off this mortal coil. It goes well. It goes too well.
The slyness of Dual lay in how much better the clone is at this life thing than Sarah herself is. She's thinner, peppier, with a better attitude. Sarah's fiancee and estranged mother take immediate note and glom onto this new Sarah with disturbing quickness, leaving Sarah, facing down her final days, to stew singly. This all jibes though -- if humanity's self-proclaimed uniqueness has been tossed into the dustbin of history wouldn't the clones, who have a real freshness and future, be born free from our existential failings? As a treatise on modern detachment Dual rings exceedingly sharp and true from where I stand, and that's even before Sarah and her double are forced to duel to the death in the film's last half through some bizarre legal entanglements involving the small print that Sarah missed in her, you know, death throes and what not.
Here too Dual, as deadpan inclined as its disposition might be, feels fiery in its back-end convictions -- what is the modern state of the law besides some way to keep us at war with ourselves unto infinity, wiping out the expiration dates on such mediocre substance as flesh, identity, selfhood? The second corporations can commodify the soul forget about it -- there will be barcode scanners on every angel harp, and our 20th-Gen selves will be birth-to-death enslaved paying off the Heavenly McMansions we splurged for one night on an Ambien whim before bed.
Dual will be released by RLJE Films in the US