Twinless | OBSCURAE at TriBeCa

Something you might not know about me: I'm a twin. I dressed in the matching clothes, I shared the bedroom, and I still get asked about if we look alike or if we can feel the other’s pain (no, we're fraternal, and no, that's not real).

There's awesome things about being a twin, but it can get pretty uncomfortable in ways you can't really imagine; you can't envision yourself as someone else, even when it's someone who looks exactly like you. These are the realms Twinless occupies, solemn then sycophantic in its drive through grief and heartbreak.

Roman (Dylan O’Brian) is grieving the death of his more extroverted, more accomplished twin brother when he meets Dennis (James Sweeney) at a support group. Suffering and lost, the two men form a deeply complex friendship, often heartwarming but also sometimes toxic. As they get closer, though, secrets simmer their relationship to a freaky attachment on a tailspin to destruction.

The film is a beautifully deranged entry in the “look both ways” cinema canon (Mean Girls and Final Destination fans, rejoice) and James Sweeney conducts it well: it's really funny but hypo-tensed, foreboding. It's kind of impeccable, really. Sweeney’s writing style bases itself within awkward silences and the errantly intrusive things we usually keep in our brains; the characters are a messy sort, lovably so, the type to paper over their faults over and over again instead of addressing them. Twinless is especially interested in those cracks—through his very delightful array of split screens and vivid compositions, Sweeney hones in on the mess, regret, and the terrible ways Roman and Dennis conjoin to a hopelessly co-dependent monster.

Dylan O’Brian frankly gives the performance of his career, fairly against type at that. In the few scenes he has as Rocky the actor brings the magnetic heft he's known for, campy and charismatic, but as Roman it’s a complete turnabout. Not to expose my past cringe but it's odd seeing O’Brian so reserved, yet quick to rage, against the context of roles like Stiles Stilinski, or action hero Thomas in The Maze Runner. He’s emotionally unrecognizable in the raw grief he wrestles with, plumbing depths with passion.

In contrast, Dennis is a compulsive gremlin whose quiet boy exterior hides a calculating and desperate loneliness. It’s hard to lay yourself bare, yet Sweeney has this very rapacious appetite for playing awful without making a mockery of it. These are two great performances, both of them rooted in a complexity of the human condition, our sense of kinship, an abject depravity I'm always happy to see explored in film.

Twinless is slightly sorta like Vertigo, on poppers, running on the energy of an off the walls 2000s movie laced with the spirit of a Hitchcockian thriller. The structure clever, the cold open lengthy, its tone elastic and hopping between the calm and the sinking feeling of encroaching terror. And it's massively entertaining. It's a premise of give and take that gets to the foundations of interpersonal relationships. Some are shaped by their connections into the best versions of themselves where others break themselves with spite trying to feel needed. There are personality problems! Cutting ironic twists! It's of sophisticated duality at play I think we need more of in our storytelling: we've been a culture starved in that we don't really explore ethical duplicity anymore, and it's amazing how much this film has that in spades.