Before the start of Twinless, a classic Sundance curio with very little known about what it was or where it came from, the writer, director and star James Sweeney was unusually withholding. The creator of 2019’s micro-budget comedy Straight Up wanted us to experience it without a detailed introduction, avoiding an earnest ramble about his intentions or hopes. It was surprisingly self-effacing but it also revealed a deeper motive: he didn’t want us to know that what we were about to see was almost certainly not what anyone was expecting.
One of the joys of a world-first festival premiere is that you may well be the only audience to ever see a certain film almost entirely blind and given the twisty, often jaw-droppingly unexpected nature of Twinless, it’ll be a hard one to keep fully under wraps until release. It’s doubly hard given how hugely impressive the film is as well, something you desperately want to talk about even though you know you probably shouldn’t. It’s therefore rather impossible to write about it without the slightest of spoilers but I’ll try to keep them to a bare minimum.
It comes in an initially, often overly, familiar package, especially at a festival such as Sundance: a comedy drama with an offbeat sense of humour. The death of educated, extroverted thirtysomething Rocky has left a hole in the lives of those he left behind: a string of friends, a devastated mother and, most painfully, an identical twin. His biological other half, Roman (Dylan O’Brien), was the black sheep in comparison, now a less intelligent and less successful reminder of what’s been lost. While sifting through his brother’s belongings, he decides to stay in town longer, eventually finding himself at a support group for those who have suffered the death of their twin.
He meets Dennis (Sweeney), who is also grieving the loss of his, and they strike up an unlikely trauma-bonding friendship. Like Rocky, Dennis is all the many things that Roman isn’t: smart, cultured, travelled and gay. They both suffer from a similar codependency issue, both a little needy without someone around who is always there, eager to do everything together. But the closer they get, the film around them suddenly shifts and we realise that things are not at all that they seem.
We then realise that Sweeney has fooled us with the packaging, the quirky set-up hiding something far stranger and far more compelling. It’s a rug-pull delivered with such confidence and style – it arrives along with a very late set of opening credits – and from then on, we’re left unmoored, unsure what it is that we’re watching and how far Sweeney is willing to go. While the comedy remains, it slides into a far darker place as Sweeney also plays with elements of a slippery Hitchcockian thriller while still reminding us that this is a film about the awful weight of grief. Scenes are often short and, tonally, we can go from funny to creepy to sad within a moment.
It’s the kind of tricky tightrope walk that could have easily seen Twinless crash to the ground but Sweeney makes his confounding and psychologically complicated film glide. He’s a delicate director but an unsparing writer, displayed most brutally in the character he creates for himself, confronting uncomfortable truths about the specific weirdnesses that can come with being queer. There’s been a recent tendency to confuse messiness with texture but Sweeney goes far deeper than that, to places that many of us might not want to recognise within ourselves. He also affords his dopey bro counterpart far more shading than we might expect, initial jabs at his airheaded nature falling away to reveal someone more complex and sensitively drawn. With flashbacks allowing for dual roles, O’Brien is a knockout, delivering two lived-in performances at opposite ends of the spectrum, one as superficially heterosexual as they come and the other, embodying a familiar gay type, commanding and electric and maybe a little dangerous too. He nails a swishiness that in the hands of another actor could be eye-rollingly distasteful but it’s utterly believable here. As his straighter self, he’s also given a sparky love interest, charmingly played by the almost unrecognisable Irish actor Aisling Franciosi.
The journey that we’re taken on – unconventional and jarring, swinging between graphic gay sex, bracingly black humour and shock violence – is never, unlike many other Sundance premieres, provocative for the sake of it. Sweeney’s smart and highly unusual film earns its boundary-pushing because he never loses sight of the inescapable, human sadness at its core. For all of its themes of identical mental and physical connection, Twinless is a true original.
Twinless is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
