Screening at Tribeca: James Sweeney’s ‘Twinless’

The indignities of grief take center stage in James Sweeney’s touching, hilarious and eventually enthralling Twinless. The movie opens with a character in mourning, the short-tempered Roman (Dylan O’Brien), having to endure numerous strangers telling him how much he reminds them of his late twin brother Rocky, who dies in a car accident off-screen. It would be hard for most people to imagine losing such a close reflection of oneself, and it’s just as difficult for Roman to put into words how shattered it leaves him (that is, without flying off the handle). But when he attends a support group for this exact rare category of people, he meets a fellow grieving “twinless” man around his age, Dennis (writer-director Sweeney), with whom he forms an unlikely friendship which reveals surprising layers and even more surprising secrets.

The movie’s strengths lie in its impeccable and often devastating performances, beginning with O’Brien’s conception of Roman. He’s a well-built, soft-spoken lunk who knows he isn’t “the brightest tool in the drawer” (his words), and he’s also notably heterosexual, while his brother Rocky was gay. This distinction further draws Roman and Dennis together since Dennis lies on the opposite end of the spectrum as a gay man who lost his straight twin, and the duo’s jagged edges slowly begin fitting together in a genuine, if mildly co-dependent, friendship. Roman’s kindness feels constantly at odds with his hair-trigger disposition, while Dennis’ wit and sarcasm appear to disguise equally complicated layers. However, in peeling each one back, Sweeney unveils a story that isn’t all it seems as it veers quickly toward the parasocial.

The two friends initially become awkward proxies for each other’s departed siblings, but Dennis hides more than he lets on about his past. This information is meted out to the audiences gradually and then all at once. Sweeney in this way imbues the viewing experience with narrative whiplash, turning the audience from sympathetic to suspicious and eventually deeply concerned as he transitions the story’s default point of view from Roman to Dennis. By casting himself in the latter role—a character whose duplicitousness proves increasingly toxic—Sweeney grounds the film’s most discomfiting choices in a disturbingly personal performance to forcefully unearth empathy for a figure revealed to be increasingly despicable, desperate and pathetic.

Brief flashbacks of Rocky allow O’Brien to swing in the opposite direction from Roman as he creates a lively, extroverted specter of the kind of person Roman never allowed himself to be. Perhaps he sees some hint of Rocky in Dennis—if not some hint of this phantom of himself—but how much of this is by manipulative design is a question that looms over the story. Sweeney, meanwhile, has a charming screen presence that he wields in sly and intelligent ways. For instance, Dennis’ snappy demeanor towards the women in his office comes off at first as delightful sass. But the more we get to know him (and the more these supporting co-workers become real three-dimensional people), the more these very same interactions begin to sour.

The movie’s transformations take unnerving visual forms, too. What starts out as a straightforward indie with measured drama and a handful of abrupt cuts to emphasize bittersweet humor takes on unexpected properties that prove anxiety-inducing. Sweeney’s initial revelations about Dennis and our first glimpses at the true nature of his unraveling materialize in the form of a dizzying mise en abyme through the impossible. This scene simultaneously reflects the character’s deepening psychological rabbit hole while embodying the film’s narrative refractions, as its story folds atop itself and re-visits key scenes to reveal vital information. Another moment, when Dennis’ house of cards threatens to come crashing down, is set in a pop-up museum installation where light itself becomes a confounding three-dimensional fabric. You’re never quite sure what’s what.

Even without its numerous rug-pulls, which occur early enough that the movie soon takes on an entirely different tone, Twinless is a masterful example of shifting cinematic POV. However, this technique is deployed not so much to fool the audience but to unsettle them by depicting how easily other people can be fooled. All the while, its most thriller-like elements are firmly rooted in a story where loss and guilt take center stage, bubbling violently to the surface in ways that make it impossible not to care about even the most detestable of characters.