When you’re premiering a new indie film at a festival, you of course want widespread, organic hype to build. James Sweeney’s Twinless, though, ended up getting a less helpful sort of buzz when it debuted at Sundance at the start of the year, with rumours of a racy gay sex scene featuring star Dylan O’Brien leading to his thirsty fans immediately leaking the film online, a huge blow for any film seeking distribution. It was an unfairly inauspicious start for a film that deserves way better, a very clever and very funny psychological comedy that should play to big crowds of proper fans, not be jeopardised by lusty Twitter-ites.
In what is pretty handily his finest performance to date, O’Brien plays Roman, a charming but not very clever guy grieving the sudden loss of his identical twin Rocky, a witty gay high-flyer with whom Roman used to be indescribably close but has lost touch a bit in adulthood. Attending a support group for this hyper-specific loss (Roman is at one point even mistaken for the dead Rocky by a friend), he connects with Dennis (Sweeney himself, adding acting duties to already being the writer and director), a fellow ‘twinless’ who quickly becomes an integral part of Roman’s life.
To go any deeper into the plot would be to ruin a story that demands going in pretty cold, but Sweeney keeps it moving in unexpected (but never unbelievable) directions for a tale of co-dependence and loneliness and lives lived in the shadow of someone who is somehow exactly like you but also better. It’s weighty psychological stuff, delivered with a light touch and plenty of laughs in Sweeney’s excellent script, which is a consistently entertaining mix of classic Sundance Dramedy chuckle-and-cringe comedy and actual proper jokes, delivered at pace by O’Brien and Sweeney as an ace double act.
Though there is a bit of a lull just before the final act kicks off, Twinless runs at a breezy pace, rarely holding on to a story beat for too long and kept vibrant by Sweeney’s stylish visuals, from a split-screen party sequence to a hilariously loaded trip to an interactive art gallery that has meaningful glares hidden behind glowing neon ball pits. And, yes, O’Brien has his sex scenes, and they are unapologetically frank, but they’re handled with the same easygoing flourish as any of the conversation sequences or car radio singalongs.
As with any good comedy, Twinless is absolutely best experienced in a crowd with which to share the laughs (and occasional gasps when Sweeney digs into his darker, more unhinged material). Bolstered immensely by a career-best performance from O’Brien, which becomes more and more complexly layered and emotionally unpredictable as the story goes on, Sweeney has, in just his second film, proven himself to be a true triple threat in a mischievously hard-to-categorise film with strong crowdpleasing instincts.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 