Dual (2022)

Dual (2022)

3/10

Starring

Karen Gillan

Aaron Paul

Theo James

Beulah Koale

 

Directed by Riley Streams

 

Dual is one of those movies that, when it ends, leaves you feeling unfulfilled. There’s so much missing in this movie, which seems to have set up a future that embraces violence for a reason that feels complicatedly woven into their world. I feel there was a better way to handle the transition from original to clone, but this movie leaves all that complication unresolved. It feels like the writer wrote the movie backward. He had the idea of a future where, for two people (an original and a clone) to coexist in the world, one must kill the other. With that ending in mind, he wrote a story to connect it. Instead of coming up with a better story and working out a better ending, they just pieced things together and submitted it as a finished work.

Director and writer Riley Streams didn’t do a good job here.

In the end, I found myself asking... is there a moral to this? If not, is there a point to be made? All these questions were racing through my brain because the movie failed to entertain enough for me to care about other things.

The plot is set in a future where people can choose to clone themselves, and have the clone take over their lives in case they are no longer living. Our focus is on Sarah (Karen Gillan). Sarah has a depressed life, is unfulfilled, and is in a dead relationship that’s just hanging on by a thread. She has a bad relationship with her overbearing mother and just wants everything to end.

One day, she wakes up in a pool of her own blood and later discovers that she has a terminal illness. Not wanting the two main people in her life—Peter, her boyfriend, and her mother—to be without her, she decides to clone herself. The double will start living her life with Peter, while Sarah waits until she dies before telling her mother. Well, things don’t go as planned. The double and Peter hit it off. The two become intimate quickly, and Sarah has to endure that, but she feels that since she’s going to die, the pain won’t last long.

News flash: she’s not going to die as soon as she thought; there’s a miracle. Sarah gets home that day to share the news with Peter, only to find her double having a meal with Peter and her mom. Sarah is angry and can’t understand the level of betrayal from Peter and her double. They’ve moved on without her, and Sarah is now left alone. Her mother prefers the double to her own daughter, and Peter doesn’t want anything to do with Sarah; he wants to be with the double.

Sarah takes the matter to the authorities, and she’s told that she and the double will have to duel for who will be the one and only Sarah.

The movie doesn’t end in a way that justifies the journey to it, and I believe it should have been done better.