Dual (Riley Stearns)
DarkImbecile wrote: Thu Jan 27, 2022 11:02 pm
Despite being heavily indebted to the work of Yorgos Lanthimos, Riley Stearns' sci-fi adjacent black comedy
Dual ends up having enough interesting ideas — and, maybe more importantly, being funny enough — to keep it from being written off as merely derivative of that style. Karen Gillan plays both Sarah and Sarah's Double, a clone generated by a company offering dying people a chance to leave behind a reasonable enough facsimile of themselves to keep their loved ones from missing them too much… Gillan carries her roles well, as does Aaron Paul in a supporting role as a personal trainer trying to prepare Sarah for the resolution to her situation; their deadpan, emotionless line delivery will feel familiar to those who are familiar with Lanthimos' direction, but fits well enough in the cold, pitiless world Stearns is presenting to feel justified.
"For originals who are very sad, every day is a struggle."
I’m on the side of any project out to ridicule anything as arrogant and insistent as the survival instinct. This is a movie about not wanting to be alive, much, yet feeling you must keep on for no good reason. The end of each breath a new promise, every sunrise a fresh failure. I love it probably more than I should.
To repeat and expand what DI said:
Dual is heavily indebted to the work of Yorgos Lanthimos, especially the first three features Lanthimos wrote with Efthymis Filippou.
Dogtooth (2009),
Alps (2011),
The Lobster (2015).
Alps is one of
Stearns’ favorite films and in some ways the very concept of
Dual could be seen as a glitched riff on that. Stearns shares Lanthimos’ brutal and absurd worldview and, as DI notes, favors a similar deadpan, clipped delivery. They manufacture conversations from lists of factoids and secret code; undressed exposition in the manner of textbooks and instruction manuals; speeches from a mix of too-obvious statements and opaque and particular metaphors that make sense to no one but the speaker, who then has to explain them.
In those three Lanthimos/Filippou films, as in
Dual and Stearns’
The Art of Self-Defense (2019), characters list tastes in music and food like robots reading online dating profiles. How many facts does it take to make a human being? What exactly forms our identity and what bonds us to others? (Perhaps it’s as simple as this: “
Humans wear shoes.”)
Here are some things that occur in both
Dual and
The Lobster:
• The joke “That would be absurd/ridiculous” is used to wave off a random absurdity in the midst of plainly ridiculous rules to highlight how arbitrarily lines are drawn between sense and non-.
• People are forced to abandon the use of their dominant hand. In The Lobster, it’s to make single people appreciate how life is easier with two things; in the Dual support group scene, it’s so survivors can appreciate their deceased double. (Also, fighting with one hand behind your back is a handicap courts dole out to people who default on clone support payments.)
• In discussing blindness (Lobster) or being blindfolded (Dual), it’s noted that the other senses are/would be heightened.
• A dog is killed. Dogs are killed in both Dual and Self-Defense; in his Dual director’s commentary, Stearns says he is a dog lover but that these deaths were good jokes to him because of Dual’s misdirection and Self-Defense’s dog-avenging-dog scenario.
• Suicide (discussed, attempted)
Here are some things that occur in both
Dual and
Alps:
• Again, the very concept: A service offers substitutes for the recently dead, supposedly for the benefit of grieving loved ones.
• A replacement that refuses to leave.
• Someone is locked out of a house in which they feel they belong; they circle around to the back of the house and are shut out by blinds(
Dual)/a security door(
Alps)
• A fake-out about transactional sex. (Stearns had one of these as far back as his first meh short “
Magnificat” (2011), and again in
Self-Defense (“Just know that every one of them… had to do this at one point.”) Lanthimos/Filippou have actual transactional sex in both
Dogtooth and
The Killing of a Sacred Deer.)
• Suicide (attempted)
Here are some things that occur in both
Dual and
Dogtooth:
• A domestic animal is killed.
• Comically awkward dance scene.
• Dialogue about how men age better than women.
(I have not seen
Kinetta or any films Filippou has written with/for other directors except
Chevalier, which is too gentle and slight to be discussed in this company.)
Stearns clearly feels enough kinship with the Lanthimos/Filippou works, outlook, and manner to sidle up and, if not wholly ape them, at least walk that way. It is frankly difficult to
not mimic the style after attentive exposure. Like how when you exit a Pinter play you may find yourself talking for ten minutes about how nice the nice fried bread is. (It’s very nice.) L&F are not Stearns’ only influence, though, when it comes to dialogue and delivery. When Jesse Eisenberg raises his voice to a bark in
Self-Defense It becomes clear the short, simple sentences are meant to recall dubbed martial arts films. And though
Dual wasn’t conceived there, basing its production in Finland either lent or highlighted a droll Nordic tone.
Lanthimos’ style can feel both like an appropriation and a very good fit.
Stearns is making fundamentally different films; they are easier and somewhat more traditional than the Lanthimos/Filippou works. He’s using enough subversion to confound, not enough to unsettle. Both consider cultures with bizarre rules. But
Dogtooth and
Alps start from a place of immersive mystery where the viewer has to figure out rules and roles and an eventual story through observation. Stearns courts sympathy from the audience and provides easy entry by having leads who are looking from the outside at systems of belonging – masculinity in
Self-Defense, happiness and basic human connection in
Dual – they do not understand. (
Lobster has more of Column B than Column A, but then it does have three separate subcultures to define; Stearns’ first feature
Faults (2014) is less willing to spell out its background rules, but that fosters a sense of growing sympathetic confusion with its lead.) He’s far more interested in sympathy and entertainment. He shares Lanthimos’ cruel sense of humor but makes more accessible a heart; he’s more willing to abandon absurdity for silliness. Take the shared gag in
Alps and
Dual where
it’s implied the lead character is being asked to trade sex for a favor. In Dual, “some sort of arrangement that is mutually beneficial” is planted early to give Aaron Paul’s personal combat trainer’s deadpan a mildly threatening edge. After Karen Gillan’s Sarah brings it up later, a few ominous beats are quickly subverted by Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz and an awkward bout of hip-hop dance instruction. Wags a finger at our thinking, adds a sense of both maturity and innocence, gives Sarah a flash of confidence. Also just plain funny.
In Alps, Angeliki Papoulia’s nurse is willing “to do anything” to get Johnny Vekris’ coach to allow the gymnast he is coaching to choose her own music. We cut to him taking his shirt off in an apartment in her presence. But she then shampoos his head and gives him the haircut he has not had since his barber died. Not more than a quick snort at subverted expectations, but there is a lot going on emotionally and thematically. It shows the messy stew of the nurse’s motivations, as she’s both doing a favor for her co-Alp gymnast (who just tried to kill herself), helping her co-Alp coach move on from a loss, and spending even more of her free time taking the role of someone recently passed. And then Lanthimos reinserts and redefines the sexual danger, cutting to the nurse, mostly naked on a bed with the mostly naked coach, showing them awkwardly simulating sex for a blind client. Prankish whiplash, more blurring of boundaries.
Both takes foster an intimacy between their duos, just not the ones we expect. Stearns goes to the window, Lanthimos & Filippou go to the wall. (If you’re going to pay for the song, you use it.)
even shares some of
Alps’ palette, though a lot of that involves hewing to common color temps,
Dual is more stylized, less reliant on natural light. Like the Lanthimos films, Stearns likes static shots – suits the humor, when it’s not being pushed to cringe – and zooms, and plies thrusts of handheld camera where you’d expect. The motion control shots used for the twinning feel impressively natural. The cutting is crisper, there’s little inclination for withering long takes.
Lanthimos soundtracks his films with catalog classical and existent pop. Stearns hires composers. The score in
Self-Defense evolves with its lead character from aggressively whimsical pizzicatish tripe to a dark buzz;
Dual lives in Emma Ruth Rundle’s electric guitar drone, sometimes cranks that to a rumble. He also uses bursts of incongruous aggro music – metal, hip-hop – as both shock and joke.
Stearns has other tendencies throughout his features. They all give the main character breakdowns behind the wheel of their car as if it’s the only place they can be emotional. (
Dual has three.) He likes to show fake media-within-movies. He likes to see objects and bodies smoothly dragged off as if they were failed performers suffering a vaudeville hook.
*
“Why aren’t I crying?”
What makes
Dual great is its dedication to its depression and how that leads to frustrating dramatic expectations.
The Art of Self-Defense grafted its outsider affectations and Stearns’ love of martial arts comradery to a tidy character arc. Not so
Dual, which opens
with an action sequence – one that, once we know the premise, seems to point to the climax. The whole midsection of the film is built around training for that climax. It’s in the pun in the title of the film. (Easily the worst thing about the film is its title.) And though what eventually happens is well-seeded and technically fulfilling, the movie just sorta wanders away from the promise of ferocious Amy Pond v. Amy Pond action. When death comes, the method is, as described by the film itself, “slow to act and not visually exciting.”
That open and a subsequent dream sequence are high-key tonal fake-outs; movie’s not even blatant about being a comedy until you’re more than a quarter-hour in. (Sanna-June Hyde’s gastroenterologist is a treasure.) Which makes it sound like it’s not a very good comedy. But you have to let despair sink in before you’re ready to laugh at it.
There are science fiction trappings. The new rules of an adjacent near-future universe, the excited elaboration and complications twinning inspires. Recent cinema and television are overstuffed with compounded busywork. But this is not a universe of possibility, it’s one of error and frustration. (The replacement service’s promotional video is mostly an admission of failure. It focuses on a double who can’t get his dominant hand right – his original even has to remind him which to use when he goes off to masturbate. It’s hosted by a replacement who creeps out his adoptive family. And of course it features suicidal imagery.) There’s the history of fictional doppelgangers, a trap there’s to be some sort of theological rumination or antagonistic psychological compare-contrast/back-forth. Encouraged by that title. (Easily the worst thing about the film is its title.) That’s led some to lay down
terrible takes and I’ll admit I first thought the movie was moving in the direction of Harlan Ellison’s “
Shatterday,” where the universe summons a competent replica/replacement for someone who’s failing as a person. People coming to
Dual hoping for that or
Gemini Man or
Dead Ringers or a goateed Spock are doomed to disappointment by something determinedly single-minded, something more in line with
Seconds’ take on Wherever You Go, There You Are.
Dual’s best fake-out may be that there is a feel-better path here and we are on it.
Sarah is miserable. She binge eats. She sad-faps to haunted house porn. She drinks enough that it’s the only thing her doctor warns her about. She and her live-in boyfriend can’t summon a conversation much less the desire to be in the same room. (The movie doesn’t force them into one until ten months after her death sentence.) She cannot stand her mother, who seems to be her only living relative and is lonely and is very interested in still being a mother. Sarah does not seem to have any friends. Or interests. She has a job that rates no mention. (Perhaps at
Hampton DeVille.) She has two good options to escape her joyless existence, change her life or end her life, and she’s too passive to do either.
Sometimes it’s nice when life makes our choices for us.
There’s evidence to be had that Sarah has been made miserable by her circumstances and that being forced out of them by her double has been an awakening. She’s escaped the denigration of her boyfriend and the relentless guilting of her mother. Extended time living Sarah’s life moves Sarah’s Double from chipper sponge to the same broken place we met Sarah. (A process echoed by another double in the survivor support group: “I don’t like the people you forced me to live with. It makes me depressed. I want to kill myself too.”) They even force the double to perpetually and unnecessarily hide her only unique physical attribute – her eye color – under contact lenses. Meanwhile Sarah is actualizing herself in a way close to Stearns’ heart, though physical combat training. (Not sure if “Motion to Stay” would be a better title than Dual, but it is more meaningful wordplay.) The training has forced her to curb bad habits, watch terrible movies, and forge some connection with another human being (her personal combat trainer Trent, the only one who ever offers her an unforced compliment). It’s inconsistent and largely dependent on time of day, but the film’s visual tone goes warmer when Sarah asserts herself, oranges finding ways into the personal combat training sessions. She’s moved on, she tells her double. She is making a new life.
However the entirety of that new life is built around winning the upcoming duel. Which sure, would represent a symbolic triumph over her old self, her old life. But also: The only thing that has made her come alive is a contrived opportunity to kill herself. Trent’s program to inure Sarah to the effects of violence is also preparing her to confront her own death. She visits a corpse meant to look like her. She’s ordered to kill a dog that shares her hair (and eye) color.
Sarah’s death reveals the limits of her ability to change, the limits of people to accept change in others. Thirteen months of concerted training and Sarah still gets the final question on the test wrong. When she first meets her double, she brightens, excited by the double’s interest in her; she cools as soon as the double starts to express her own tastes and an openness to things outside Sarah’s inclinations. Sarah’s Double is not the secret sharer she thought she’d adopted. But a year later Sarah is still desperate enough for connection that, despite initial resistance, she drops guard and allows the double to play on that. Meanwhile, Sarah’s boyfriend and mother are complicit in Sarah’s Double’s plan. They would rather help murder a loved one and keep the replacement they hope will perform their desired functions as girlfriend/daughter than accept a Sarah who may find a life outside theirs. (Then again, Sarah ostensibly ordered her double for them without consulting them. It’s implied she does it because she wants to be remembered and gets angry when it turns out they instead want her to be replaced.)
Perhaps they see it as assisted suicide. Perhaps it is.
Suicide is such a thorough suggestion in Dual there should be a hotline number on a crawl throughout. Sarah’s terminal disease is a manifestation of her depression (“everyone is having a hard time believing there were no signs or symptoms leading up to this;” “it will be painless, but it is killing you”). The whole world is a reflection of her depression. Everyone is miserable. Doctors are depressed. Trent’s dog, who looks adorable and content, is “suffering. He’s in an immense amount of pain.” When Sarah tells a clerk that she’s “looking for an outfit to die in,” it’s surprising there isn’t a devoted department and a long line at its register. Outside of casual introductions and the first blush of new relationships, smiles are scant. The no-frills networking interfaces designed for the film are as joyless as the interactions they host. (The second-worst thing about the film, after its title, is the “Poor Connection” buffering message. Too on-the-nose, perhaps only redeemed by literally appearing over someone’s nose.)
The replacement program is supposedly only for people with proof of terminal illness, and certainly terminally ill people commit suicide, but when someone hangs themselves in your promotional video you’re saying something about your target demo.
The replacement process – more offhand and speedy than a Fotomat drop-off – is pitched as “a gift for your love ones. Can you put a price on them not having to be sad?” But of course this new lease on life – as with a lot of late-stage life-extending medical procedures in our fiercely capitalist country – passes on a generation of debt while providing a questionable, temporary stopgap. (There can’t be doubles of doubles. We all know that.) Doubles aren’t even technically alive until they assert their rights; they aren’t killed, they’re “decommissioned.” And the only legal corrective should both living beings want to continue living is to have them fatally sort it out amongst themselves as public entertainment. Life is very expensive but has little value.
Originals who win duels wish they were dead. Doubles who survive their originals wish they were dead. Sarah screams on the ride home after her doctor tells her she’s not dying.
Sarah’s Double’s plan is so obvious and she is so preposterously obvious while executing it that it is hard to think Sarah has a blind spot that large or has dropped her guard that low. Sarah entertains her knife before she leaves, decisively puts it down; she’s done fighting. Parked at the end of the road, drinking too much from the labelled water bottle her rival handed her, she sets off with meager preparations and depleted resources. She finally reaches the woods everyone stares longingly at on their walls. There’s no suspense, no tension. Natural sounds creep in, the score opens, brightens. She’s with a supportive friend who catches her when she falls, who agrees sympathetically with the last thing she says. If not a subconsciously shared plan, it’s a pretty good way to go. Even if it is slow to act and not visually exciting.
There’s a final fake-out, that Sarah’s Double has replaced Sarah not only in life but as our hero. That we end with the inescapability of her circumstances. But this isn’t a tragedy, it’s a comedy, and Sarah has triumphed. Look at that final shot. When we revisit Sarah as the credits roll, everything seems so natural, satisfying, peaceful. We should all be so lucky.
Eventually we will be.
Karen Gillan is revelatory in a way designed to be highlighted yet easy to overlook. She’s as good if not better than Colin Farrell’s great showy unshowy turn in
The Lobster. Instead of channeling her energy into not doing things she injects a world of bland desperation into hints of numbed expression. The miss-them facial tells: Sarah’s Double’s uptick at the corner of her mouth when Sarah compliments her eye color; Sarah’s incremental eyebrow flash at the climax in the woods, barely caught by slow-motion. Her attempts to smile politely without actually smiling. Stearns often feeds actors line readings so they can mimic tempo and inflection, freeing them to express character elsewhere, and Gillan’s vocal tone cuts a wide swath of grays. She’s playing the double as an entitled child, but also a learning machine programmed to emulate Sarah, and by the time we reach a late period exchange between the two there’s not only an imitative similarity to her but a prideful ambiguity. Gillan goes loud a few times and doesn’t always make it fit, and it may be a too delicious when she lets Stearns’ deadpan slip into sarcasm. And she’s certainly never had problems going minimal as an actress before. But here she more than meets Stearns’ level of consideration and control.
(The feature Gillan directed,
The Party’s Just Beginning (2018), is also drenched in suicide. It’s more an “
Edward is Deadward”-style survivor’s story that displays some playful ideas and keen Inverness locations (and a terrible Lee Pace accent) before overextending itself in a way that makes band-aids necessary. But it’s an invested project that shows Gillan’s not flippant about the subject.)
*
“I don’t know, it looks haunted.” “But look, there’s a pool!”
Bears repeating: This is a very funny movie! Not just in effort to counteract miserabilism, and not just because all humor is gallows humor. But because in its muted tone Stearns makes pervasive his absurd outlook and maximizes his awkward dialogue to exacerbate mundane despair and mock attempts to stave off the inevitable. Attacking particulars of his own ridiculous concept exposes a world where life has been rendered meaningless through technology, through language, through living. It’s hilarious what we’ve done to ourselves.
Applying flat, officious delivery to the sly craft of a phrase like “they sometimes would prefer to continue to live” works euphemistic reverberation into dark giggles.
My favorite line, which I’m eager to recite at robocalls selling tax debt relief: “Between the personal combat training, clone support, and hip-hop dance classes, money has been a little tight recently.”
And shout-out to the pitch black throwaway about kidnapping trauma.
What happens when you suspect the world is better off without you but get the math backwards? Who wins when two people are fighting for a life no one wants? I’m not pretending everyone will sink in and chuckle along. The delivery system might make
Dual seem one thin note held too long; I might envy those who can casually look up from it. And there’s room to find it alien and frustrating and dull and pointless. As Sarah sees life. It may promise action, and it may look sharp and move crisply. But this a march. It is a wallow. It is a mood piece and its mood is the sound of the last laugh. There are people who will love this movie the way they love their sadness and I hope for them they find it.
DarkImbecile wrote: Thu Jan 27, 2022 11:02 pm
Since this was purchased in one of Sundance's larger deals, I assume it will be widely available enough soon for someone to offer some insight:
Why would the double's plan — which Sarah's boyfriend and mother are aware of and supporting — be to pretend to be the original Sarah? It seems to unnecessarily complicate things when she could have easily arrived at the duel as the double, be declared the winner, and take over the life she wanted without having to fake anything.
I guess a big deal at Sundance will now get you shuffled off to a second-tier streamer like AMC+ after a token release.
Strange this didn’t bother me on first watch as the wind-down is a couple ticks too long (irony noted) and that would have saved those. fwiw, Stearns does not address this in his commentary. I don’t have any problem imagining his world includes extra-weird specific rules about the punishment being worse for doubles murdering originals, histories of doubles being treated as second-class citizens in the court of law, etc. For me, the bigger hurdle is that there has to be an easy biological way to find out if she’s a replacement. There’s also a missed opportunity to re-involve Trent, who I’m sure has been paying attention to the news, but that would just drag things out further and may show more of a connection between him and Sarah than Stearns wants there.
But I think the reason the deception didn’t bother me is that Sarah’s Double’s whole purpose is to become Sarah. The very first directive the replacement technician gives her after introducing her to Sarah is that, “When you replace her, you’ll take her name.” As the opening scene shows, doubles who win duels are given their originals’ identities on the spot. So having essentially won an off-site duel the title is her goal and her right, something she’s eager to claim, and then something she realizes by becoming every bit as miserable as Sarah ever was.
So I guess my guess is: Because she wanted to. And having the fallout of getting something you thought you wanted be a trial of unnecessary complications and then also misery lines up pretty well with this world.