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

polygon.com:

This review was originally written in conjunction with Dual’s release at the 2022 Sundance International Film Festival.

Over the course of three widely spaced feature films — Faults, The Art of Self-Defense, and the new Dual — writer-director Riley Stearns has slowly revealed himself as a filmmaker focused on confrontation, but only when it’s couched in the quietest and most intense terms. There isn’t a lot of yelling or fighting in his films. But the simmering desire to yell and fight is always right below the surface for his single-minded characters. They clearly weren’t made for violence, but they often wish they were — or pretend they are. Everyone in these films seems overwhelmed by the conflicts that have seized them, and everybody’s trying to figure out how to win, but nobody wants to be rude about it.

In Dual, that dynamic comes with science fiction elements for the first time. The opening scene makes it clear that the film’s title, no pun intended, has a dual meaning. In this world, cloning is easy and almost instantaneous, and terminally ill people are encouraged to clone themselves — “So that your loved ones won’t have to suffer the loss of you,” according to one ad. But because clones are meant to take over their progenitors’ identities, if circumstances change and the original cell donor doesn’t die, they have to duel their clone to the death to see which of them gets to continue to exist.

That premise is absurd on a thousand levels, but Stearns leans straight into the absurdity, particularly with that ad for the cloning service, which presents a deadpan scenario where a depressed man clones himself so he can commit suicide in peace without making any of his family members suffer. This kind of brutally