The Devil's Double (2011)

Lee Tamahori's The Devil's Double arrives as a sweaty, gold-plated tour through the House of Saddam, following Latif Yahia as he is conscripted into service as the body double for Uday Hussein. It is a gangster picture dressed in military fatigues, all nightclubs, torture chambers, and electric knives. The film has appetites and it indulges them. There is little interest here in moral instruction, which spares the audience a lecture but leaves the enterprise feeling like an especially grim episode of a premium cable drama.

On the matter of casting, the production draws heavily on Middle Eastern and North African performers, though this reflects the film's Baghdad setting more than any curatorial instinct. The dual lead falls to Dominic Cooper, a white British actor, in a decision that would raise eyebrows in a later decade. The women fare worse. A bride is raped and takes her own life. A girl is beaten and dumped. A lover exists to be endangered. None of them are granted interiority, and the film does not pretend to offer any.

The political texture is period detail, not commentary. Oil fields are mentioned as a pretext for invasion. Uday's excess is rendered as the madness of one man, not a symptom of a system. There is no environmental conscience, no meditation on the body, no interest in neurodivergence, and no queer presence at all. What remains is a vivid, unpleasant, competently made thriller about a monster and the man who wore his face. It is biography as spectacle, and spectacle rarely carries a thesis.