When Roman (Dylan O’Brien) first attends the support group for people who’ve recently lost a twin, he’s a bit startled by the leader’s introduction scheme. She announces they’ll go around the circle, sharing names, plus “one thing you don’t miss about your twin.” Everyone laughs nervously — but of course, it’s a joke. All these grieving people aren’t going to bad-mouth their dead siblings. That would be inappropriate, even if it’s a little funny, maybe even cathartic.
That sort of indecorous but also strangely poignant tone rules “Twinless,” the second feature from the writer and director James Sweeney, who also stars alongside O’Brien. Sweeney plays Dennis, a guy Roman meets in the support group. The pair become instant friends, bonding over their mutual loss. In each other they find solace, someone to grocery shop with, eat pizza with, play video games with and share their sense of loss with. Dennis is gay, brainy and a bit of an indoor cat by nature; Roman is a straight, sweet jock prone to malapropisms. But there’s something healing in this friendship, for both of them, especially once Dennis introduces Roman to his co-worker Marcy (Aisling Franciosi).
It’s hard to describe “Twinless” fully — or explain what makes O’Brien’s performance in the film so great — without giving away too much; it’s best you go in fairly ignorant of what’s really going on. If you are spoiler-averse and planning to watch the movie, you might want to stop reading after this paragraph. But before you go, I’ll say this: despite its charms, and it is frequently charming, “Twinless” also succumbs to some of the issues that tend to plague movies of this type, the small and clever dark comedy about young people having big feelings. The trouble is this: I get distracted by wondering if anyone really would act like these people do. It’s ridiculous to demand veracity from movies, I know, but when it diverts attention from the emotional core of the movie, one might wish the twee was dialed back a tad.
But that’s not the whole movie, and for long stretches it works, almost against logic. (Bail now, spoilerphobes.) There is, not tonally but narratively, just a hint of Hitchcockian weirdness to this tale because before it’s barely begun we learn that not all is as it seems. In fact, Dennis knew Roman’s twin, Rocky. The fact that he has crossed paths with Roman is far from accidental; it is a product of sexual or possibly romantic obsession, born out of profound loneliness, and Roman has no idea. This also means O’Brien plays both twins, with remarkable agility (to be honest, I barely recognized him when he popped up the second time). One actor, two characters, the object of desire? Sounds familiar.
“Twinless,” though, is not a thriller. It lives somewhere between a dark comedy and a wincing tragedy, with seriously pathetic overtones that Sweeney, to his credit, carries in his own performance. The more we get to know him, the more pitiful Dennis seems, someone who is not just mired in his own lies but damaged in ways he hasn’t even tried to recover from. Often a movie gives us an unlikable character with whom we eventually empathize, if not like, as we come to understand him; Dennis is kind of the opposite, growing more distasteful as we get inside his head.
But then again, his flavor of trauma is pretty vanilla: Dennis is just a lonely man. He’s a guy who developed abandonment issues in childhood, and they’ve only expanded in adulthood. He may not have had a twin, but he’s obsessed with twins because to him, a twin is a person who ensures you will always be understood.
That is the real core of “Twinless.” It starts out seeming like it’s going to be about the experience of having a twin, something relatively unusual. (Only about 3% of births result in twins.) But really, it’s about the most familiar of human needs: to be close to someone else, to be known, to know that you’re not alone in the world.
That need may be common, but finding it fulfilled is increasingly rare. In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an urgent public health advisory identifying an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” He might as well have been talking about Dennis, or even Roman, or anyone else they pass on the street or meet in a support group or talk to at a party. If “Twinless” is a bit uneven, it at least gets this right: The drive to be known can turn us all into the protagonists of our own weird, obsessive, funny, painful little tragedies, and there’s no guarantee of a happy ending.
Twinless
Rated R for a couple of steamy sex scenes and some bad language. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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