- Directed by Brandon Cronenberg
- Written by Brandon Cronenberg
- Stars Alexander Skarsgard, Mia Goth, Cleopatra Coleman
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 57 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVnIMvVEkrA
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
A lovely resort vacation goes far off the rails. There’s a real science fiction element yet it seems to be pretty much set in our world and time, which gives it a surreal quality. It’s violent, disturbing, and all-around interesting to watch.
Synopsis
James and Em are on vacation at a tropical resort.
There’s a local tradition where there’s feasting and music. The band wears really creepy masks as they play. She wants to eat at the Chinese place in town, and James mocks the whole idea. One of the locals drives an ATV around the beach to scare the tourists. Gabi approaches James and chats; “I loved your book,” she says. She knows who he is. Gabi and her husband Alban invite him to dinner tonight… at the Chinese restaurant.
The four have dinner at the fancy Chinese place, which is actually part of the huge fenced-in resort area. Alban is an architect, and Gabi is an actress. She’s made a career out of “failing spectacularly” and demonstrates that she can’t cut bread with a knife—it’s a sort of a gimmick. James has taken six years on his second book, and he’s starting to think it’s a lack of talent. Em doesn’t work because she’s rich and supports James. They all seem pretty normal.
Alban and Gina have invited them out for the afternoon. Em warns James about getting mugged; that happens around here. They get in a car and drive out of the resort, and we see the place has some serious-looking barbed wire around the walls. They drive down the mountain to a private beach where Gabi does something naughty to James.
After the sun sets, they all head back to the resort. James is the only one who’s mostly sober, so he drives. The headlights go out for some reason, and he hits a man in the street. They all freak out, but Gabi says everyone should get back in the car and forget it ever happened. They do not want to get arrested in this country, so they all go home.
Back at the resort, the gates are closed, and the guards say that guests are not allowed outside the border of the compound. After some persuasion, the guards do relent and let them back inside.
The next morning, the police come for James and Em. They go to the police station and are separated. The police inspector asks James to deny they took a rental car out yesterday because the guy renting it to them would get in legal trouble. He does deny this, but then he’s accused of stealing a car and running over a man. The inspector says Em has confirmed all this. Federal law says the family’s eldest son will have the right to kill James in retaliation. The dead man had two sons. Ouch!
The inspector says that for a significant amount of money, they will supply a substitute for the execution. This substitute would be killed instead to satisfy the sentence. This is something they offer to support the tourist trade. They take James to the ATM right then.
There’s more to it than simply replacing him for the execution—they are literally making a double of him. They make him stand in a room that fills with goo that gets all psychedelic and then does something to him.
He wakes up with Em as he recovers. “They told me the double turned out correctly,” she says. They go and look, and it looks exactly like him—and then it wakes up.
Em and James are required to go watch the execution. The whole double-substitution thing is not a secret; it’s just how the law works. The nine-year-old son of the dead man approaches James-2, who cries and begs for his life. The boy stabs James-2 to death in front of the audience. James watches from the audience, mostly in shock. Afterward, they give James the ashes as a sort of souvenir. Em wants to leave the country immediately, but James somehow lost his passport.
Gabi tells him that something similar happened last year to Alban; some men died on a construction project, and Alban was blamed. She invites James to a small party with a handful of people. “We’re all zombies here,” says one of the women. “Everyone here is a brother,” Alban says. They’ve all been in his position at one time or another. Dr. Bob asks him, “Do you worry that they killed the real James?”
One of the guests wants to play a game; in return, he can help with the passport problem. Tonight, they want to go up the hill and kill the mayor. You can easily get away with murder here if you pay the duplication fee, so why not have fun? They break into the man’s home wearing those weird masks from earlier. They capture the man and two women and tie them up. Gabi tries to talk James into shooting the man, but he can’t do it. A bodyguard comes in shooting, and there’s an all-around gunfight; Alban gets shot, along with several people from the house.
The whole group is arrested and taken back to the police station. The others are not in the least upset. This is just part of the game for them, and they know they’ll just buy their way out of it. The inspector says he’s tired of all this and they are pushing the limits of their hospitality; today, he wants to “make a statement.” “We’re ready to pay now!” screams one of the men as they’re all taken to the execution chamber and killed. Then we see that they were duplicates and didn’t know it. How can they tell them apart if they don’t even know?
One of James’s friends says that it’s the inspector who’s holding up his passport and that he’s due for an injection of something at the hospital that evening. The gang enters the hospital and kidnaps the inspector, who is sedated on a gurney. James takes drugs to get himself pumped up and then beats the hooded man. Gabi pulls off his hood, and James sees that it’s really a duplicate of himself—or is he a duplicate? “We paid the detective to make another double just to have some fun with you!”
James goes into the bathroom and takes out his hidden passport; he had it all along. He gets on the bus to the airport, but the gang shoots up the bus and forces it off the road. They say they’ll kill everyone on board if James doesn’t give himself up. They aren’t going to let him leave that easily.
The group makes James walk back as Gabi calls him names and demeans him all the way there. She reads him bad reviews of his book. Eventually, he runs into the woods, but Gabi shoots him in the leg.
Wounded, James limps towards a farmhouse, where he passes out. He has another psychedelic dream before he wakes. He goes outside, and Alban, Gabi, and the others are there, along with the duplicate version of James on a leash, crawling like a dog. They hand James a knife and say he must kill the other one. When James throws the knife away, the “dog” attacks him. With no other choice, James beats the other James to death. Gabi consoles him after.
The next morning, James calls Em and tells her his flight details. We see that he has at least three urns of ashes with him now. Gabi, Alban, and everyone else gets on the bus to go home as well—they all seem very civilized and sensible.
The resort closes for the season, and we see that James has remained behind.
Commentary
The technology needed to duplicate a person like that is way out of reach for such a third-world country. Other than that, what a great place to vacation! Actually, this is my big gripe about the film. At no point is this a science-fiction world, nor do we see anything else out-of-the-ordinary here– just the duplication process as part of our ordinary world. It’s a little hard to swallow on its own in this particular location.
We thought James couldn’t find his passport for a while because the real James had already gone home. The gore here is excellent, there’s a lot of interesting, weird imagery in the hallucination scenes, and the whole concept of “Am I real?” is ever-present here. Overall, it’s an uncomfortable movie, but it’s also really good.