The trailer for The Devil's Double just dropped, and it's as sadistic, depraved and exciting as expected. Adapted from a memoir by Latif Yahia, it follows its author as he's recruited by Saddam Hussein's eldest son and one time heir apparent, Uday, to become his permanent body double. Suddenly with access to an arsenal of wealth, women and drugs, Latif gets plastic surgery and begins embracing his new life until Uday's wild behavior starts spinning even further out of control.
Largely an afterthought now that he's been dead almost a decade, Uday Hussein made his father look like the Snapple Lady. He was probably as close to a modern day Caligula as we're ever going to get. He once murdered his father's valet at a lavish party for former Egyptian President Mubarek's wife, horrifying guests and enraging Saddam so much he actually expelled Uday from Iraq for a short time and appointed his younger brother the heir apparent. Take a look at the Yahoo trailer below…
Sleek and full of intrigue, the trailer for The Devil's Double is wonderful in a lot of ways, but that should be expected after the film opened to very warm reception earlier this year at Sundance. Word is the movie is a very hard R, though that fact likely speaks to authenticity more than anything else. To properly capture all the horrors that were Uday Hussein, there would be no way to church the final product up enough for anything less.
The Devil's Double opens on July 29th. There's still no word on how wide it might go, but aside from the brutality, the subject matter puts it more in line with a larger budget summer film than a little seen indie. I hope it plays to at least one thousand screens, but that might be a pipe dream. We'll see how hard Lionsgate pushes it.
