At first blush, Twinless sounds like typical Sundance fare — a twee, tear-jerking indie that, despite boasting a recognizable face, will have a quiet release and otherwise fade into the ether.
Yet thanks to its deftly twisty black comedy and a breakout performance from Dylan O’Brien, writer, director, and co-star James Sweeney’s sophomore feature has emerged as one of this year’s best surprises.
Twinless, in theaters Sept. 5, is up front about its tonal irreverence from the get go — a quiet Portland street suddenly upended by an offscreen hit-and-run immediately smash-cuts to a funeral where errant sobs clunkily intermingle with the violinist’s pitchiness. No one is more adrift than Roman (O’Brien), who has buried his identical twin Rocky for all of two minutes before being confronted by weeping mourners who see him as a pale simulacrum of who he calls “the good twin.”
A sweet, aimless lunk who’s the first to admit that he’s “not the brightest tool in the shed,” Roman finds himself drawn to a support group for others who have lost twins.
At first, things don’t look too promising — like the funeral violinist, the group moderator’s attempts to sandwich her stand-up comedy bits into a meeting display Sweeney’s talent for locating the absurdist, darkly funny moments that arise while attempting to navigate the shattering, all-encompassing gravity of grief.
Things start looking up for Roman when he becomes fast friends with fellow attendee Dennis (Sweeney). It doesn’t hurt that the witty, cultured, and gay Dennis is enough of a neurotic mirror of his late twin that Roman wastes no time using their newly formed codependency to fill the proverbial void (“I feel like being a twin kinda f***ed me,” he admits. “I wanna hang out all the time, I’m too needy.”).
Cutting between improvised banter and painful silences, Twinless easily could’ve inched its way to the 90-minute mark as a more maudlin take on the opposites-attract dramedy of Straight Up, Sweeney’s debut feature — thank God it doesn’t.
[Major spoiler warning: If you want to go into the film totally clean, stop reading now and book it to your local theater.]
Just when Roman and Dennis have settled into a lull, Sweeney jumps backward in time to deliver a late-credits bombshell: Dennis had the date of his life with Rocky, dubbing him his “potential soulmate” before getting ghosted. Now he has his own ulterior motives for befriending Roman that skew Vertigo by way of Dear Evan Hansen, if that musical actually acknowledged Evan’s sociopathic tendencies. Jung Jae-il’s score oscillates between pulsing synths and somber cello, grounding the raw immediacy of Roman’s loss amid the subtle menace of Dennis’ obsession.
Dennis’ behavior is wild, but really, he’s a walking testament to the fact that our society’s fixation on twins is, well, weird.
Twinless is happy to mine the cringe comedy of strangers’ reactions to identical twins — how many “You look so alike!” and “Did you ever switch places?” refrains the average twin has heard, I shudder to think.
Beneath the novelty of it all, Sweeney links our cultural fetishization and doppelgänger-esque fear of twinhood with universal human anxieties around companionship. If even the people who came into the world with another half find themselves alone, what hope is there for the rest of us to escape the isolation of everyday malaise?
After amassing a teen cult following in YA staples like Teen Wolf and the Maze Runner franchise, O’Brien has more recently shifted to indie character work (last year’s Sundance saw him hamming it up as a smarmy wannabe pimp in the crime drama Ponyboi). Yet for all his 2010s internet boyfriend acclaim — like Dennis, many an ex-Tumblr user would do depraved things to suck this guy’s toes — the actor’s dual roles in Twinless is his most revelatory turn yet.
O’Brien’s sly, charismatic turn as Rocky lends the film a rare, ebullient spark, making his absence in both Dennis and Roman’s lives that much starker for the rest of its runtime. He has a harder and ultimately more satisfying part to play as Roman, imbuing rich layers of raw devastation and unbridled anger under his buffoonish exterior that I can only hope position him as the heir apparent to Channing Tatum’s onscreen himbo legacy.
Much sooner than Dennis would like, their twosome becomes a threesome when Roman hits it off with Dennis’ perky coworker (The Nightingale’s Aisling Franciosi). It’s not long before she starts questioning Dennis and Roman’s meet-cute, setting the stage for their deceitful bromance to come crashing down.
For all his wry comedic timing, Sweeney is a bit more at sea straddling his script’s more dramatic moments — watching the sparks fly between him and O’Brien during their fast-talking hookup left me wishing that the two were starring in a screwball comedy together instead.
A few stray creative flourishes, too — whether they be a fruitless Brian de Palma-style split-screen party sequence or a tight, one-shot monologue from O’Brien that reads more acting exercise than confessional — occasionally betray the notion that this is a filmmaker still nailing down his signature style.
But even as Twinless careens toward its sudden, briefly violent resolution, the rest of Sweeney’s dramedy is so clear-eyed in its farcical vision that you can’t help but root for our ill-fated duo to make it out intact, no matter how many trainwrecks are thrown their way. And what, really, what more can any of us ask for?
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