Riley Stearns initially caught my attention with his cult film Faults, but it wasn’t until his sophomore feature The Art of Self-Defense that I realized this was a writer/director who was making films that resonated with me completely. This is a man who understands satire and how to combine it with dark comedy to delirious results. I knew instantly that Dual would probably be high on my list of Sundance faves, but I wasn’t prepared for just how right that statement was.

It opens on a football field where a man (played by Theo James) stands in front of a table of weapons. Stands are erected at one side of the field and a camera crew captures the excitement as the referee starts the match. A tarp on the opposite side of the field falls and the individual hiding behind it immediately lets loose an arrow that soars past the man, who knocks over the table for a shield.

The crowd politely claps.

Eventually, the man grabs a knife, charges to the other side of the field, dodging arrows, and plunges his knife into his assailant over and over again. When the damage is done, cinematographer Michael Ragen (who also shot The Art of Self-Defense) tilts the camera down to reveal the dead person looks exactly like the man who stabbed him. “Remind me…are you the original or the double?” the referee asks.

It’s the near future and the world looks similar if somehow off-kilter to American life. This is helped along by the pandemic-directed choice to film in Finland due to COVID. It’s an inspired choice that is helped along by technology that seems both current and retro; normal laptops that have old school UIs, for example, that make Dual feel somewhat timeless. Sarah (Karen Gillan) is in a spiral. Suffering from a rare disease that has a 0% chance of survival (though in a hilarious little aside, the doctor mentions there’s a 98% chance she’ll succumb to it), she is ordering too many tacos from drive through, downing too much alcohol and video-calling her boyfriend Peter (Beulah Koale) who seems vaguely uninterested in Sarah’s situation.

When she’s given the almost finite news she’s going to die, she makes the decision to contact the ominously named The Facility, who are able to clone dying people so that their family members won’t suffer the loss. When she gets there, she tells the technician that the cost is exorbitant. “Can you put a price on them not being sad?” he counters, but then tells her that when she dies, her replacement has to take on the cost. Because capitalism. And an hour later, Sarah’s meeting herself…or at least a physically better version of herself, she notices, between The Double’s very clean skin and her hair that shines brighter than Sarah’s. They spend time together so that The Double can take on Sarah’s personality, but it doesn’t completely go as planned and Peter ends up loving The Double more than Sarah.

So does Sarah’s mom.

Which makes for quite the predicament when that 0% survival chance’s margin of error comes back and Sarah’s in complete remission ten months later. Because of the length of time, Sarah can’t decommission The Double and, based on the 28th Amendment, the only way to solve the problem is with a duel to the death.

What follows is a darkly hilarious exploration of capitalism, the medical field, and relationships that ends on such a fascinating and inspired note. The characters all talk with a deadpan affectation that’s reminiscent of Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which helps to enhance how removed from life Sarah is. The only moments where she’s able to reveal her true feelings come while driving, alone and separated from the rest of the world. The affectation also separates the characters from each other, showing how callous and unloving the world can be. The fact that one of the more emotional moments is silent as Sarah and her trainer Trent (a fantastic Aaron Paul) dance shows how disaffected the world of Dual is.

By the time it reaches the end, Riley Stearns sidesteps what I thought would be the ending and delivers something that’s both nihilistic yet deeply funny; words that could be used to completely sum up Dual, as a whole. This film worked on so many levels and has cemented Stearns as a writer and director to watch.