Dubs
2019 · 34m
Directed by Anthony Greyley
Genres: dark comedy, drama, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, tender, tense
Justin and Ollie, a couple under strain, enrol in a government dubbing programme that produces a clone of Justin, Kid, who must live with them for four weeks while he learns about the world. As Justin bonds with his double, Ollie withdraws, and the arrangement pushes their relationship towards a breaking point.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The clone-as-relationship-salvage premise is genuinely perverse—most films would use the double as a thriller device, but Greyley uses it as a mirror for intimacy itself, watching a couple fracture while the 'new' version of one partner learns to be human. Dark enough to work, conceptually ballsy enough to matter.
Greyley positions this squarely in the lineage of body-horror relationship cinema and domestic sci-fi (shades of early Glazer, Yorgos Lanthimos's procedural cruelty), and the film's measured pacing and tonal control—tender one moment, suffocating the next—shows a director aware of exactly what tradition he's working within and why restraint serves it.
The casting choice to have the same actor play both Justin and Kid—present in the frame together, aging in reverse through performance micro-adjustments—is the decision that transforms what could've been a gimmick into something genuinely unsettling; it's a single technical commitment that forces everything else (the editing, the blocking, the couple's isolation) to work in service of it.
Reviews
Praising the gorgeous visuals, seamless twinning effects and improvised performances, while finding the cloning ethics and identity themes only lightly explored.