Review: The Devil’s Double (18) ****

This portrait of the despot’s psychotic elder son – a coke-snorting playboy, thug, sex sadist and casual murderer – would be barely believable was it not based on the memoirs of Latif Yahia, the ex-soldier in the Iraqi army who became a reluctant body double for Uday. The resemblance between the two men was said to be so close that even Uday’s confidants could not tell them apart. And for Dominic Cooper, in dual roles, the film offers up the kind of opportunity most actors can only dream of.

In The Devil’s Double Latif is made an offer he cannot refuse: to become Uday’s double. Like his father, who routinely uses doubles for public events, speeches and wherever assassination is a risk, Uday demands special treatment. And what Uday wants, he gets. As his fixer Munem (Raad Rawi, excellent) observes to Latif: “Uday has chosen you. You belong to him.”

Thrust into Uday’s world, Latif is a witness to his master’s whims. An untouchable figure, out of control and probably insane, Uday snatches schoolgirls from the streets, rapes a bride on her wedding day, slashes and disembowels his father’s food taster and watches torture videos for kicks.

Yahia’s book, and Cooper’s performance in Lee Tamahori’s film, presents Uday as a hybrid of Caligula and Sonny Corleone, the erratic elder son in The Godfather. As Uday, Cooper is compelling and chilling. He affects a high-pitched voice, childlike and menacing in equal measure and manages a series of convincing and nerve-shredding violent explosions.

As Latif he is less credible, the accent occasionally wobbling as the Englishman within slips out.

The story’s weakest plot point surrounds Uday’s favourite companion, a sexpot named Sarrab (played by the French star Ludivine Sagnier), who falls for Latif.

Their relationship and eventual flight from Iraq to Malta smacks of artistic license and puts the brakes on the action.

A (slightly overlong) companion piece to The Last King of Scotland in its portrayal of evil run amok, The Devil’s Double is a reminder of what can happen when reason and control are cast aside. And it marks out Dominic Cooper as one of our most watchable young stars.

Also Out

Project Nim (12A): Director James Marsh won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for his extraordinary film Man On Wire about tightrope walker Philippe Petit’s daring plan to walk across the divide between the Twin Towers in New York. For his new film, Marsh stays in New York, delving into the true story of a 1970s Manhattan family, who were invited to raise a chimpanzee baby as a human child.

The experiment proved successful to a point and the chimpanzee called Nim became a media sensation. However, the people involved in the project were blind to the consequences of their actions, stealing a chimpanzee infant away from its mother and starving it of contact with other primates.