Dual is a 2022 dark comedy written, directed and produced by Riley Stearns, (Faults, The Art of Self-Defense).
Karen Gillan stars as Sarah, a depressed alcoholic who learns that she's terminally ill and opts to have a clone made of her to act as her replacement when she's gone. But when she goes into remission, she must fight her clone to the death over right to be the only Sarah. Aaron Paul plays a martial arts instructor she turns to for training.
Not to be confused with Duel.
Tropes:
- 20 Minutes in the Future: Everything about the world is the same, except there's now a service that creates identical clones of people, whipping them up in under an hour. There's also a 28th amendment dealing with clone rights.
- Accents Aren't Hereditary: In keeping with the Where the Hell Is Springfield? ambiance, Sarah runs across twins with thick British accents, but their mother has an American accent.
- Action Prologue: We start with a duel between a man and his clone. They have no further role in the story.
- Always Identical Twins: Sarah runs across young identical twin girls who help her reconcile with her own identical double.
- Artistic License – Medicine: Sarah's terminal stomach illness, which makes her occasionally vomit blood but has no other symptoms and then just randomly goes into remission, is not based on any real-world illness.
- Bait-and-Switch:
- Sarah wakes up with a pool of red liquid covering her pillow and bedspread, implying that she coughed up blood in the night. Then the camera pans over to a half-empty bottle of red whiskey, implying that she just vomited in her sleep after overdrinking. Then she goes to the ER and vomits up blood, revealing that she does have some sort of illness.
- Trent says that he's willing to accept a mutually beneficial trade in lieu of payment. When Sarah takes him up on this mysterious offer, she arrives at his dojo, they both begin taking off their clothes... and then she teaches him hip-hop dance.
- Chekhov's Skill: Sarah exercises in part by taking hip-hop dance classes. She later uses her knowledge to give Trent a hip-hop dance lesson to pay for her final month of martial arts training.
- Clone Angst: Only one is allowed to be Sarah. The other must die.
- Color-Coded Eyes: Sarah's Double is identical to Sarah except for her blue eyes, which Sarah says are more rare and therefore more interesting than her own brown, establishing Sarah's Double as a slightly more glamorous person than Sarah ever was.
- Crashing Dreams: Sarah dreams that she starts eating her old penny collection to spite her mother, then starts vomiting huge amounts of pennies all over the table. She awakens to discover that she's vomited in her sleep.
- Downer Ending: Sarah's Double kills Sarah through treachery with the help of Sarah's former loved ones, yet her life falls into the exact same disrepair that Sarah's did, only now she's got a limp, doesn't know how to drive, and needs to buy contact lenses to hide her identity.
- Establishing Character Moment: Sarah is introduced ordering a large amount of Mexican food, drinking alone, and then getting ready to masturbate to porn before taking a call from her boyfriend and lying about her activities, showing her rather dreary life and strained relationship.
- Expository Hairstyles: Sarah almost always has her hair pulled into a simple ponytail, while her double always wears it loose, showing that her double is slightly more fashionable and put-together than she is.
- Foreshadowing: Sarah fails to identify poison during Trent's test, but he says that poison is almost never used in a duel. Later, Sarah fails to spot the obvious signs that Sarah's Double poisons her while they evade the duel, causing her to die.
- If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!: Trent tests Sarah's killer instinct by demanding that she kill his dog, whom he says is terminally ill and in great pain. She can't bring herself to do it, though she's perfectly willing to kill her double.
- Kill and Replace: Doubles are allowed to petition to survive, in which case they're allowed to duel the original to the death for an opportunity to kill them and take their place.
- Mugged for Disguise: Sarah's double wears Sarah's clothes to the duel to pass herself off as Sarah, even though no one saw what Sarah was wearing that day. It's purely to temporarily confuse the audience.
- Never Given a Name: Sarah's clone is only ever called "Sarah's Double," since she's not supposed to have an identity of her own. The two must ultimately fight over the right to be the real Sarah.
- Noodle Incident: We don't see what happens after Sarah realizes that she's been poisoned. However, when Sarah's Double emerges from the forest, she's got an unexplained limp that stays with her into the epilogue that happens some months later.
- Other Me Annoys Me: Sarah is clearly somewhat intimidated by her double, who has fewer physical flaws than her and seems to be generally more suited to living her life than she is herself. Then it's revealed that her double has already been taking over aspects of her life while she's still alive, such as going out with her boyfriend and visiting her mother.
- Out-of-Character Alert: It's kept ambiguous for a little while as to who emerged from the forest after Sarah's Double poisoned her. Then Sarah gives a simplistic description of driving, mirroring Sarah's Double's limited understanding of driving, and states that she doesn't like Mexican food, which we saw Sarah order at the beginning of the film, revealing that Sarah's Double has killed and taken over Sarah's life. This is confirmed when Sarah's mother calls about her color-changing contact lenses.
- Pun-Based Title: "Dual" refers to the duality of the two main characters as well as the fact that they are supposed to duel.
- The Unfought: Despite the build up throughout the film, Sarah and her clone never actually fight the official duel as Sarah's clone tricks her into drinking poison. The limp that the double walks out of the forest may suggest that there was a scuffle of some kind after Sarah realised what was happening but nothing is ever confirmed.
- Where the Hell Is Springfield?: It's never made clear where Sarah lives. She has an American accent and uses American money, but many other characters have British, Australian, or German accents. The license plates are generic white and have European dimensions. The final scene takes place at a traffic circle, which are rare in America. The film was shot in Finland.
