Writer-director James Sweeney is no stranger to novel concepts that walk a tonal and thematic tightrope. In his 2019 feature-length directorial debut, Straight Up, he starred as a young gay man so turned off by sex that he seeks a relationship with a woman, turning a silly and potentially retrograde setup into an anti-rom-com exploration of contemporary sexual identity, OCD, and the modern complexities of finding love. Sweeney brings the same keenly observational millennial eye to his sophomore feature, Twinless, a bizarrely moving and darkly comic story about feeling like you’ve lost something you never had.
Twinless opens at a funeral, with the straight Roman (Dylan O’Brien) and his mother (Lauran Graham) receiving mourners after the death of Roman’s twin brother, Rocky (also O’Brien). Struggling with the loss of his other half, the shy Roman joins a bereavement support group for siblings processing the death of a twin, and it’s there that he meets Denis (Sweeney), a quick-witted gay man who’s everything that Roman isn’t. Soon, the two strike up a friendship that helps in some small way to fill the gaping hole left by their respective brothers. But when it comes to Denis, everything may not be as it seems, and before long Roman will have to contend with the fact that his surrogate twin may not be telling him the entire truth.
The inspiration for Twinless is rooted in Sweeney’s childhood obsession with wanting a twin, as well as him learning about bereavement support groups for individuals who lost one. The film essentially allows him not just to unpack what compels us culturally—and, for some, sexually—about twins, but also the complicated dynamics of how it must feel to lose the person you shared a womb with. Sweeney writes with great care and perceptiveness about this loss and how it impacts one’s sense of self while boldly adding plot complications that expand all of it into a soft Almodovarian or sub-Todd Haynesian rumination on the nature of identity and emotional truth.
The film is a real showcase for O’Brien, who leans into a wonderfully naturalistic effeminacy as Rocky, and he shows himself to be one of our most fearless hetero actors in a laugh-out-loud hilarious gay sex scene. And as Roman, he’s quietly devastating, displaying a raw depth of emotion that ultimately outpaces Sweeney’s on-screen capabilities, but the filmmaker is wise enough to know when to take a backseat to his costar, and it benefits the film as a whole.
Sweeney fearlessly dedicates himself to playing Denis as something of his own twin-fetishizing Tom Ripley, and his writing is often so personally confessional that the pure masochism of the comedy makes him the best vehicle for it. Visually, the film is no marvel, but Sweeney and editor Nikola Boyanov frequently use smash and jump cuts to great effect, often nesting them together in a short span of time to build to forcefully humorous visual crescendos, as when a conversation about The New Adventures of Mary Kate and Ashley snaps into twin-centric dirty talk or a sudden death smashes to a character cartoonishly sobbing, before the film then quick cuts to the same character bewigged and grim-faced at a funeral.
In taking a hyper-specific personal fixation and running with it, Sweeney has made a crafty friendship comedy that, in addition to being sotted with laughs both bitter and sweet, plumbs unanticipated emotional and thematic depths. Midway through Twinless, Denis states, “The trick is to say something that is emotionally true but factually false,” and you’d be hard pressed to find a more apt summation of the Sweeney’s winking yet earnest, off-kilter filmmaking.
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