Writer-director Riley Stearns is back with another feature that feels very specific to his voice and style. Dual stars Karen Gillan as Sarah — and also as Sarah’s Double.
The story takes place in a world where a cloning technology exists that lets people who are dying create a copy of themselves to live on with their loved ones. Sarah opts to put this technology to use after she’s diagnosed with a terminal illness. However, after her "replacement" is created, Sarah finds out that she’s actually in full remission. The law states that only dying individuals are allowed to have clones, so now Sarah and her double must duel to the death to figure out who will live on as the one and only Sarah.
With Dual celebrating its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, I got the chance to chat with Stearns, Gillan, and also with Beulah Koale who plays Peter, Sarah’s boyfriend, and Aaron Paul who plays Trent, Sarah’s combat trainer for the duel.
Dual boasts a fascinating concept that very easily could have lent itself to a more straightforward, fully grounded approach to telling a story that highlights the challenges (and benefits) of using such a technology. However, one of Dual's standout qualities is that it's brimming with authorial expressivity that feels very specific to Stearns, and he knew he needed to find a company that was dedicated to upholding that. He explained:
“I think I’m pretty fortunate in that this is my third feature, so I’ve got sort of a track record and people can go back and watch Faults or The Art of Self Defense and see that maybe if something on paper reads a certain way, they know that there might be a little twist on that, or that subversion on that expectation of what that plot would give you. XYZ who ended up making the movie were pretty great. Read it, said, ‘We want to do this and we love your stuff. Let’s just make your movie,’ as opposed to some of the people that I met with before who were either not able to totally jive with it or wanted to make a lot of changes to where it went, so it was kind of a match made in heaven.”
As someone with a habit of obsessing over the backstory of an especially intriguing concept, I had to ask Stearns for a little more information on the cloning technology’s place in this world. Is it frowned upon or a societal norm? Stearns offered some insight into that matter and also revealed some information on how he imagined such a technology came to be:
“I think it’s the norm, but obviously it’s cost-prohibitive so not everyone goes that route, but they’re able to sell people on it because the way that they structure the payments. I think it’s just accepted, and I wrote a short story version of this film before I wrote the feature and I got halfway through it, which is like 20 pages, and didn’t end up finishing it, but it was really cool to go through the process that way, which I’d never done before. Because it’s prose, you get to have more fun filling in all these gaps and talking about the history of things. So I had this alternate timeline history that it was developed during the Cold War to increase the amount of people in our military as a build-up, and then they ended up making it to where you could only use it for these medical situations. And I love that the move doesn’t talk about any of it. Any other movie would explain everything too much or have to because of the world that you’re in whereas in our tone and the setting of the movie and the way that it feels, you can just say it is and then it is, and that was more fun for me.”
A personal favorite quality of any movie tends to be when a story encourages me to consider what I might do in a particular situation. In Dual’s case, playing that game is a bit morbid, but it’s still a fascinating predicament to consider. Would you commission a replacement or let life take its natural course? Gillan put a pretty hard no on creating a clone and Paul suspected he’d leave the decision to his family, but Koale was the one who might have found the best use for this technology:
“I’d make a hangover one. When I’m hungover and not a great husband or father, I pull the Beulah 2.0 out of the closet and go, ‘Alright, I’ll turn you on now.’”
In addition to a myriad of curious details regarding the technology and the rules of the original vs. double duel, Dual also incorporates movies within the movie. While it didn’t make the final cut, Stearns tried to throw in an Easter egg that would make any Mandy fan proud. He explained:
“There was one Easter egg that didn’t make it on camera. There’s the fake movie that we have in the movie that she watches and Trent had a stack of all his burned DVDs. They’re all burned like he ripped them from Kazaa or something like that. Whatever the version of that was in this world. I made up a bunch of fake movie titles and then I put Mandy 2, so my friend Panos [Cosmatos] and Aaron Stewart-Ahn’s movie would live in the world in some way, but it never made it on camera so Mandy 2, I’ll have to use that at some point.”
Eager to hear more from Stearns, Gillan, Paul, and Koale on Dual? You can catch our full conversation in the video at the top of this article!