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On the moring after the devastating party in The Devil's Double during which Uday kills Kamel Hana and ultimately rapes and kills a young school girl we see Uday/Latif lying in a hospital bed after an overdose of pills. He's visited by Saddam and others, among them Latif/Uday. I admit that at this point the movie's double role actually got me and I am not sure who was who there. There are different facts which seem to speak for one or the other and the more I think about it I can't wrap my head around what is more likely to have happened.

  • Either Uday drove his partying too far and accidentally took an overdose, or Latif took an overdose in order to flee his hopeless situation by suicide.
  • The one in Saddam's entourage seemed very calm and controlled and didn't say anything, certainly not really traits of Uday, yet maybe he just didn't have to say anything or felt intimidated by his father.
  • Saddam beats him and seems to want to exert more severe punishment upon him with a knife (to which one of the doctors says that could kill him from blood loss). Yet maybe he indeed has more extreme ways of punishing his son for such outrageous behaviour.
  • When leaving, Saddam says something like "I should have killed him right after his birth", which might suggest that it's Uday he's talking about. But it might as well have been a way of pretending that it's his son in order to reassure everyone that Latif still has his job as Uday's double.

So who took the overdose, Uday or Latif? It might very well be that this has been deliberately left ambiguous, but on the other hand the movie didn't really play much with the doppelgänger motif at all and in the rest of the movie there has always been a clear distinction between Uday and Latif. So maybe I just missed something and there are more hints or even hard evidence as to who was who in this scene.

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  • I'll watch it again, but I'm pretty sure it was Latif.
    – Ben Plont
    Commented Aug 8, 2014 at 20:34

1 Answer 1

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It's Uday.

  • It's Uday in the book. The film is based on The Devil's Double by Latif Yahia, the same Latif who (allegedly) was Uday's double. In the book, Uday attempts to take his own life with an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol out of guilt over murdering Kamel Hannah. The film reenacts the scene from the book almost faithfully, which includes Saddam storming into Uday's hospital room, yanking the tube out of Uday's mouth and slapping him.

  • There are actually some subtle visual differences between Uday and Latif in the movie. Uday has buck teeth and a slightly lower hairline, just like the person who overdosed.

  • As you mentioned, Latif is cool and controlled in the scene unlike Uday, but you've missed the fact that Latif is also wearing the exact same clothes (suit, shirt and tie) that he wore in the party, so the scene probably took place soon after it.

  • Again, as you mentioned, Saddam says "I should've killed him at birth". This doesn't strike me as an attempt at a ruse, considering the fact that Saddam also attempts to castrate him before he's stopped by the doctor. It makes more sense to castrate Uday as a punishment (and "cure") for Uday's promiscuous ways and indiscretions.

  • Major film sites concur that it's Uday, including IMDb, TvTropes and Movie Spoiler (search for the word 'pills' in any of them).

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