Twinless (2025, James Sweeney)

58/100

SPOILERS ahoy. I would advise watching the film prior to reading this, as there's an early twist-of-sorts.

File alongside Sydney Pollack's Random Hearts under Dynamite Fucked-Up Scenarios Gone Inexplicably Wrong. (Key difference being that I liked Random Hearts significantly more than most others, whereas Twinless has been widely acclaimed.) "Lovelorn dude invents dead identical twin in order to meet, befriend and project various emotions onto the (straight) identical twin of his recently deceased hookup" is a helluva logline, and Sweeney makes it more enticing still with one of the best fake-outs in recent memory: When Dennis worriedly tells co-workers (he doesn't really have friends per se) that the guy he slept with the other night hasn't replied to any of his texts, we naturally assume (this being a flashback) that Rocky isn't answering because he's no longer alive...but no, turns out he was genuinely ghosting Dennis, and then gets killed out of nowhere before he can explain, apologize, or say much of anything at all. Bizarrely, though, Sweeney declines (or simply fails) to incorporate that haunting sense of inexplicable rejection into Dennis' warped relationship with Roman. Their dynamic is still plenty unhealthy, being founded on multiple lies, but it's unhealthy in exactly the same way that it would be had Rocky, say, died of a heart attack during that fateful tryst—Dennis' need for Roman plays like garden-variety grief, uninflected by any need to understand why a night that had seemed so magical and intense (to us as well as to him) apparently meant nothing at all to Rocky. Just a weird squandered opportunity, and I find it odd that nobody else seems to have noticed. That aside, Sweeney demonstrates a strong facility with actors (himself included), getting two wildly distinct (arguably too distinct, though the range is impressive) performances from Dylan O'Brien, who appealed to me not at all in Love and Monsters (I skipped all the Maze Runners), and guiding Aisling Franciosi through an arc that begins at broad caricature and then gradually deepens without ever becoming any less comically stylized. Visually blah, but unfortunately I now take that as a given for low-budget American indies and get overly excited when anyone demonstrates even a little formal ambition. A stronger final scene might've pushed the film into "solidly recommended" despite its refusal to go in the direction I'd wanted. Instead, it sorta fizzles, and I'm left hoping for a bigger swing next time. Sweeney's got that potential, even if I don't agree that it's fulfilled here.