Riley Stearns explains the bizarre performances in his micro sci-fi movie Dual

polygon.com:

Riley Stearns’ Dualis exactly the kind of indie movie that fans of thoughtful science fiction are always looking for: a strongly idiosyncratic vision of a completely new world. Guardians of the Galaxy’s Karen Gillan stars as Sarah, a woman who agrees to clone herself when she’s told she’s dying of an incurable disease. The clone is meant to take her place — as a representative of the cloning company cynically tells her, she’s paying to make sure her friends and family won’t have to be sad when she dies.

But then her fatal condition reverses itself, and suddenly she has to live with and pay support to the clone, who’s stolen her boyfriend, won over her mother, and generally is doing a better job of being Sarah than Sarah was. Legally, the clone can’t be destroyed, even though it’s no longer necessary, and Sarah is told she’ll have to battle it to the death for her place in society. Unused to murderous violence, Sarah turns to fight trainer Trent (Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul) to teach her how to kill.

Dual raises a lot of big, interesting questions about society and humanity, but some of them have been overshadowed by the acting style in the movie — the characters are so deadpan that they seem unemotional, and they say the most outrageous things without giving away how they feel about it. It’s a style familiar from Stearns’ previous movie, the engaging, subversive comedy The Art of Self-Defense, and to a lesser degree, from his fantastic first movie, Faults. But in Dual, it seemed to take viewers by surprise — even critics who enjoyed and praised the movie called the performances “eccentric, over literal, and stiff-backed” or “almost robotically numb, artificially stilted.” Critics who didn’t like the film were less kind.

Po