Sundance Review: Karen Gillan In ‘Dual’

Sundance Review: Karen Gillan In ‘Dual’

The influence of the Greek “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.

The opening sequence of Sundance Film Festival U.S. Dramatic Competition entry Dual sets the tone, albeit a little clumsily. A regular Joe in sneakers, jeans and a grey hoodie stands on a football pitch where a foldaway table presents him with a variety of options: an axe, shears, a combat knife, a crossbow and a mallet. A TV camera tracks him while he chooses, but his opponent shoots first, drawing gasps and light applause from the audience, signaling the start of a vicious fight to the death. Pierced by arrows, the man grabs the knife and charges, taking down his assailant in a frenzied stabbing spree. In a bizarre twist, the killer and the victim are revealed to be the same man: one Robert Michaels, killed, it seems, by his own lookalike.


“The double has won the duel,” notes 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.


When we first meet Sarah (Gillan), she is about to have these questions thrust upon her. Faced with her impending death, due to a mysterious but virulent disease, she can either arrange her funeral or invest in a double to learn her habits, tastes, thoughts and mannerisms, then take over her life from whenever she leaves off.


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. So, a date for a duel is set to settle the matter once and for all, and, just to rub salt into the wound, Sarah must continue to pay off the installments on 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. Some of that strangeness might be attributed to the shoot, with the Finnish town of Tampere doubling for Anywhere U.S.A, and some very dubious, stilted performances (a generous reading might suggest that there are doubles everywhere, slyly taking over from the originals).


But once it hits its stride, Dual can be a lot of fun, especially when Sarah enlists the help of survivalist Trent (Aaron Paul) to 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 Dupe, a very funny take on the old fable of 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, Dual does, at least, justify stretching this idea to feature length, culminating in a surprisingly moving payoff that gives Gillan a rare chance to show her range as two emotionally different but equally difficult women forced to fight, literally, for their lives.