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Dual, Riley Stearns’ new movie, is set in an unspecified future where everybody for some reason speaks like a robot and cloning has gone from something just Barbra Streisand practices on her beloved Cotons de Tulear to something commonly sewn into the fabric of many people’s lives. People aren’t duplicating themselves willy nilly, though. The practice typically caters to those whose deaths are imminent, whether from a terminal illness or a suicide with which they’re certain they’re going to go through. The clone is meant to take over the original’s life once the latter dies — that way the affected family doesn’t have to grieve — with the copy typically spending a few months with the person they’ve replicated so as to be a near-perfect facsimile when it’s officially showtime. 

It’s recommended you involve your family in the cloning process to maintain respectful transparency. But Sarah (Karen Gillan), Dual’s depressed heroine, opts not to. She doesn’t want to worry her mother (Maija Paunio), to whom she refuses to disclose her recently diagnosed ultra-rare terminal illness. (She’s been coughing up blood uncontrollably, and she learns there’s a 98 percent chance she’ll die from the disease.) She keeps her always-away-on-business boyfriend Peter (Beulah Koale) in the dark, too, though he eventually becomes aware of her bleak fate by mistake. (Sarah accidentally wrote his number as the hospital’s primary contact rather than her own.) 

At first Sarah is pleased with — maybe even a little jealous of — her double. She has fetching blue eyes rather than her brown ones. She’s in better shape, too, with no cellulite or love handles helping define her figure. It’s immediately clear she’s more assertive and confident in herself, too — easy things to be when you haven’t yet experienced the heavy weight of the world. 

When Dual jumps ahead 10 months, though, Sarah finds herself living something as close to a nightmare as she can get. The clone has ingratiated herself into both Mom’s and Peter’s lives, and both people prefer her to the real thing. Mom appreciates how much more her “new” daughter calls her, and Peter loves the way the duplicate’s voice twirls upward when she says his name. Doctors also inform Sarah that she is now among the 2 percent of people to survive her illness. That great news is quickly dulled by the fact that Sarah’s double is now determined to be autonomous rather than subjected to the decommissioning other unwanted clones can get. She wants to be her own person. In this futureworld, a clone’s request to stay alive lawfully results in a duel to the death between the original and their ringer. It’s forbidden for there to, essentially, be one of the same person.

Sarah starts seeing a self-defense trainer (Aaron Paul) to help prepare. Her copy, meanwhile, continues living the life she has pretty much stolen. Judging by the handful of frustrated screams Sarah lets out in the course of the film, there is meant to be a true emotional pull in this movie that’s almost less about the horrors of having a twin that’s out to get you and more living under a government allowed to play so fast and loose with your identity. And there are supposed to be real laughs coming from the narrative absurdity and the way everybody talks: there’s a deadpan-affect epidemic wherever Dual is set. 

But Stearns doesn’t quite pull everything off. The intentionally dispassionate performances and writing make it hard to look at anybody or anything going on as real enough to care about (Gillan’s android-like work becomes quickly annoying), and the meant-to-be-comic stiltedness is so mannered that we take more notice of its self-consciousness than the things we should be laughing at. There are interesting things going on, with a war with oneself being made so literal and all the gesturing toward malicious governmental interference on your survival. But any initially compelling ideas Dual has are undermined by a knowingly flat, opaque presentation that, after a while, has the same effect as being unintentionally so.