Dual (2022)
Directed by Riley Stearns
A terminally ill woman opts for a cloning procedure to ease her loss on her friends and family. When she makes a miraculous recovery, her attempts to have her clone decommissioned fail and lead to a court-mandated duel to the death.
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5 films that influenced Dual
What critics say influenced Dual
Dual exists somewhere in the cross section between a Yorgos Lanthimos movie (specifically Dogtooth or The Killing of a Sacred Deer) and an episode of Black Mirror.
Another way to put it is Stearns is trying to make his version of a profoundly idiosyncratic Yorgos Lanthimos movie (“The Lobster” being the apparent parallel), where odd duck people behave eccentrically, performances walk a razor-thin tightrope tone of the unusual and peculiar, dry, deadpan laughs are the order of the day.
The result is a delightful blend of Yorgos Lanthimo’s The Lobster with Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow , because if your story is dealing with clones, you have to talk about just how easily disposable human beings are and how so much of our existence is pointless because it’s so easily replaceable or replicable.
Dual exists somewhere in the cross section between a Yorgos Lanthimos movie (specifically Dogtooth or The Killing of a Sacred Deer) and an episode of Black Mirror.
Like Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018) and the commonplace nature of its prison system-like WorryFree job/housing program and the stardom that awaits participants in its fictional I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me game show, both of which were treated as regular aspects of everyday life, the clones and their acceptance into the world are treated by this film as equally common.
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This is the same group that worked with Panos Cosmatos’s phantasmagorical Mandy (2018), Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson’s time-bending drama Synchronic (2020), Sion Sono’s apocalyptic western Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021), and Eric McEver’s tokusatsu comedy Iké Boys (2021).