Duplicity - Feature Film in Development

Further details of the film can be found below, but if you are interested in being a part of this exciting project please get in touch via our Contact page here.

PLOT SYNOPSIS

Marie Gray is a troubled but brilliant scientistic. When she gets confirmation that she is a sufferer of Vanishing Twin Syndrome (that as a fetus she absorbed her unborn twin), she realises that she can use her experimental teleportation technology to create the twin she never had by duplicating herself.

The resulting Marie2 seems to be a perfect physical copy, and her creation seems to give both of them a mental boost by entangling their essences. But they are not identical. Marie sees visions of a spiritual realm which Marie2 does not, and in that realm sees something torn from Marie2 before she is made flesh. Indeed, Marie2 acts with little concern for the consequences of her actions, believing she is above good and evil. That, coupled with the fact that Marie2’s body starts deteriorating, pushes Marie2 to strive for power above all else, with increasingly psychotic and violent results.

Marie 2 takes off and creates a copy of herself, Marie3, hoping that the mental boost she and Marie originally felt will continue. It does and the copies upgrade the teleportation machine to create many more copies simultaneously. With enough Maries, the reasoning goes, they will be able to understand what is happening to them and find a way to stop the deterioration before they die.

Marie and her friend Patrick find them and try to talk them down, but Marie2 makes many copies and together they come up with a new plan. They kill Patrick and tell Marie that if she joins them, they can resurrect Patrick. They plan to make an infinity machine that will create and merge infinite Marie copies. Their quantum entanglement will allow them to merge with the universe and become everything. In short, they will become the Godhead. But for it to work, Marie must join them.

Marie makes a leap of faith and agrees. As she merges with the infinite Maries she brings to the Godhead that spiritual essence that was torn from the copies in their making. That paradox unmakes the god, returning the Maries to whence they came but leaving Marie2 trapped for eternity in the space between the worlds. Patrick, briefly returned to life, brings Marie back home by the fact of him being there. Marie says goodbye to Patrick and is left alone, now able to grieve the loss of her friend and her unborn twin in the knowledge that they have gone on to some other, undefined place.

Full screenplay by Blaise Hesselgren available on request.

SCIENCE VS RELIGION THEMES

The premise of the film is that a fully scientific view of the world, with all of one’s ethics derived from this type of thinking, leads to ruin and despair.

Marie has always considered herself a committed rationalist but Marie 2, with a total lack of a spiritual side, takes this to new levels, and it is she who is Nietzschean in her beliefs that there are no moral truths to be followed.

We examine where a person is left when their beliefs are purely deterministic and scientific. Like Nietzche, Marie 2 believes that moral “good” and “evil” are a meaningless human construct: all that exists is atoms in motion and so all we can strive for is not to be a “good” person but to maximise our control and power.

Marie 2 however ignores this need for a spiritual and religious side to life. This blindness to anything outside of science is in fact the most radical form of belief, and drives her increasing mania throughout the plot. Marie 2 becomes a corrupted Christ-like figure, increasingly dogmatic in her version of faith in science and power.

THE AESTHETIC OF THE FILM