So I both love and hate this latest film by Brandon Cronenberg. I have to admit that it got me good by purporting to be about Western tourists taking a risk on the wild side of a lawless, undeveloped country, but of course it’s the tourists who are the predators all along, joke’s on me. On the other hand, I really hate films in which the main character is sort of high and in an altered mental state the whole time as is the case here. He is never able to articulate why he does the things he does and just sort of goes along with the flow. It’s got some neat ideas, but that’s all there is and it has no interest in world building at all.

Writer James Foster is vacationing at a luxurious resort in the fictional country of Li Tolqa with his wife Em, hoping to gain inspiration for a follow-up to his debut novel. There he meets Gabi, a woman who claims to be a fan. She invites the couple to spend time with her and her husband Alban. Over they reveal that Alban is a retired architect and Gabi is an actress. Naturally James makes next to no money as a writer but Em’s father is rich and that is how they can afford to be at the resort. One day they invite the other couple to a day trip outside, despite warnings that the locals are hostile to tourists and it may be dangerous. They drive a rented car past countryside dotted with poor villages to arrive at a beach. They have a great time and when night falls, Alban asks James to drive as he is too drunk. Along the way, he hits and kills a local man. The other couple insist that they flee the scene as the local authorities cannot be trusted. The next morning at the resort, both James and Em are arrested by the police. Detective Thresh explains to them that the penalty for the crime is death but their country has a unique system of justice. In exchange for a fee, a perfect of James can be created and that double will be executed in his place. James is forced to watch the process in fascinated horror and it soon emerges that both Gabi and Alban have done the same thing many times over their many visits to the country.

The first phase of the film sets things up nicely for a great fake-out. At first, we’re screaming at James not to be stupid about taking unneeded risks like in every horror movie ever. Then when the couple are arrested by jackbooted enforcers and hauled off a brutalist police station, it only reinforces those fears. But then everything takes a sci-fi twist and this turns out to be another type of film entirely. The idea that it’s the tourists who are the real monsters isn’t that original but it’s neatly executed. It doesn’t take long at all for it to dawn on us just why it is that Alban and Gabi love going to what is supposedly a hellhole of a country. In exchange for a cash payment, they are allowed to do pretty much whatever they want and it is their clones who suffer the consequences. The inversion is vividly captured in the imagery of the barbed-wire fencing and extensive security around their luxurious, all-inclusive resort. At first, we think it’s to keep the tourists safe from the envious locals. But in fact, it’s the locals who need to be protected from the murderous foreigners.

The problem is that the mechanics of how the process, both technical and legal, work are more than a little dubious. The film has no interest in exploring how the doubling actually works and that’s fair enough. One tourist does mention that they tried to replicate it in a laboratory setting but failed, so maybe there’s some mystical element in it. I can also buy that the ruling government lets the tourists terrorize the peasants in exchange for cash. But I find it hard to believe that they are allowed to go full Clockwork Orange on the moneyed elite. That’s also ignoring that if this country has the capability to make clones, that would be far more commercially lucrative than offering cheap thrills to tourists. Here and there, it teases the existential horror of the clones being perfect replicas such that there is no difference between them and the originals. But the treatment is similarly shallow as none of the characters have the philosophical inclination to think deeply about the implications. Instead, Gabi keeps egging James into ever more horrible atrocities with ridiculous appeals to strength and dominance while he more or less sleepwalks through the whole film in a fugue state as if not quite believing that any of it is real. I’d point out that these are actually two distinct fears, that the clones are themselves sentient and that the real draw for the tourists to return to the country again and again is because they get to murder with no consequences. This might actually be a more salient film if it didn’t have the doubling process at all.

Anyway I was onboard for this part of the way through and it felt like a wickedly topical film given the protests against over-tourism last year. I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt when the doubles are revealed but the film just gets worse and worse from that point forward. The characters are all irredeemable monsters and there is no sane point of view character through which the audience can judge them. Who really knows what detective Thresh thinks of the tourists? That James perceives everything through an alcohol or drug-induced haze only reduces its impact but I suppose helps to explain why they do all these crazy things. It has a promising start but ends up being a disappointment.