Dual review: a small, strange clone war pits a woman against her duplicate

The original review was written for Double’s release at the 2022 Sundance International Film Festival.

Over the course of three widely spaced feature films — Faults, Self-Defense: The Art of Self-DefenseThe new, Double — 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. His single-minded characters have a deep desire to fight and yell. 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 RudeLearn more.

DoubleThat dynamic includes science fiction elements, for the first. 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.

This premise may seem absurd at first glance, but Stearns focuses on the absurdity. Stearns’ ad for the Cloning Service presents an absurd scenario in which a man suffering from depression clones himself to commit suicide peacefully without causing any family members pain. It is a film that displays a brutal, sarcastic humor. Anyone who can’t see themselves chuckling at least a little bit at the bleak prospect of a new clone calmly coming across his progenitor’s corpse and taking his place would be advised to steer clear.

Photo: RLJE Films

Stearns channelling the absurdism via SarahGuardians of the Galaxy’s Karen Gillan), a prickly young woman who’s astonished to learn that she has a fatal illness with no cure, and just a few months to live. The doctor who breaks the news is surprised at Sarah’s calm: “Most people cry when doctors give them bad news, which is why most doctors are depressed,” she tells her patient. But Sarah’s remove is mostly disbelief. Except for the occasional tendency she has to cough up large amounts of blood, Sarah feels great. However, she chooses to pursue the clone option. The expense puts her off at first, but the clone counselor she speaks to gives her the Riley Stearns equivalent of a hard sell: the completely straight-faced, flat-voiced statement, “You must understand that this is a gift for your loved ones. Can you put a price on them not having to be sad?”

As it happens, though, not only are her boyfriend and mother not noticeably sad at the news of Sarah’s impending death, they like the clone better than they like her. And when, inevitably, Sarah’s irreversible illness miraculously reverses itself and she realizes she’s going to live, her family shuts her out and embraces the clone instead. She will win the public duel with clone Sarah (also played, naturally by Gillan in an amazingly smooth performance). Orphan BlackThis is a dual-role style, which means that you learn how to fight and how to take on the role of killing someone exactly like yourself.

A sudden flood of multiverse stories explore alternate narrative routes for familiar stories, and bring different versions together. Double reads oddly like a small-scale version of the same idea, where Sarah has to confront her failures by seeing how successful she might have been if she’d made different choices. It also works well in horror stories that feature evil counterparts. Characters learn to appreciate their lives more when they are robbed by an alternative version. It’s surprising how bitterly twisted the familiar message about gratitude for life seems. DoubleThis could be because Sarah has seen very little of Sarah’s personal support and warmth in the years before she was cloned.

That’s largely due to Double’s peculiar remove from reality, a form of stylization that’s easily been its most contentious and divisive choice. Stearns teaches his actors how to deliver a deadpan, stiff-faced delivery. Nearly every line of Stearns’ script is an inhumane declaration, which highlights surrealism within a already absurd setting. Another movie might reach for the horror and melodrama in Sarah’s impending death and replacement. It might also lean harder on the way her dystopian world seems designed specifically to torment her, with laws that make her financially responsible for supporting the clone that’s supplanting her and plotting to murder her in that heavily foreshadowed state-sanctioned duel. Stearns, however, presents the facts in the most objective way. Sometimes it makes Sarah seem less real or more human than her manipulating clone.

Photo: RLJE Films

Stearns used a similar tone to in Self-Defense: The Art of Self-DefenseThe awkward, nebbish Casey is (Jesse Eisenberg), and after being mugged seeks martial-arts instruction from Alessandro Nivola (a comedy-macho sensei). This plotline is paralleled in Double Trent is a fighter trainer who Sarah has connected with (Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul) in hopes of toughening herself up for the duel. In both cases, Stearns mines a lot of extremely dry humor both from the students’ credulity and willingness to go along with anything, and the teachers’ ludicrously specific and unlikely training methods. (Sensei makes Casey stop petting his dog, because it was making him soft; Trent makes Sarah watch gory movies, noting that they aren’t very good, but at least they’re very bloody.) The comedy of having actors act with so much sincerity but little tone affect in both of these cases is the fact that the actors don’t seem to try to make the audience believe the unreal facts.

All of which makes Stearns’ movies funnier, but not necessarily more engaging. Self-Defense: Art of Self-Defense It is more a joke, mocking the self-destructive and artificial aspects that men often add to their conceptions of masculinity. But Double is playing with tougher subjects and more sensitive emotions, and the distanced, mannered approach doesn’t always serve the characters well. Viewers might feel compelled to add their emotional pain and fear into Sarah’s story. Sarah is clearly suffering and Sarah’s life is at stake. A single scene where she breaks down in tears in her car — which Gillan plays with heartbreaking conviction — does more to make the character seem human and relatable than just about the entire combined run time of the movie.

The ending is especially difficult to accept. Double as even a bleak, macabre comedy. It highlights the film’s cynicism about everything — about the capitalist structures that push Sarah to solve her own mortality by buying something to replace her, about the family and personal relationships that offer her so few options, about the society that considers her replaceable, about the negligible value of the life she’s built for herself. It’s a strange and memorable film with a unique voice and a unique perspective, and that alone makes it worth seeking out. But just as Stearns’ characters seem to be constantly suppressing a shriek of dismay or despair or defiance, viewers may come out of this one suppressing the urge to go yell at Stearns and demand a satisfaction that the movie isn’t about to offer.

DoubleOpening in Theaters: April 15, with streaming via AMC Plus, and being available digitally for rental and/or on-demand starting May 20.