Twinless starts like a prototypical Sundance movie––grim and serious, plus unexpected levity. That’s the general formula for a festival that might as well have manufactured the term “dramedy.” In this case there’s an offscreen car accident and quick cut to a funeral. Roman (Dylan O’Brien) stands grieving beside his mother (Lauren Graham) as the casket containing his gay identical twin brother, Rocky, is lowered into the ground. It’s a somber affair––tears, tissues, a violinist’s rendition of “Danny Boy”––until the song pauses abruptly on a false note, engendering awkward silence. It’s the first permission you have to laugh, then to recognize the faint absurdity of a gathering in which mourners approach Roman and bawl at his uncanny likeness to the deceased.
This kind of sad, strange, bewildering tone makes up the first 20 minutes of James Sweeney’s dark comedy (or lighthearted drama?) and it’s not long before ones gets a sense of where this is going. Not long after his death, Roman returns home to Portland and attends a bereavement group (led by a standup comedy hopeful played by Tasha Smith) for newly twinless siblings. That’s where he meets Dennis (Sweeney), a gay graphic designer who makes for easy conversation and lets Roman open up about Rocky, his more learned, traveled, extroverted brother. They buy groceries together, visit Seattle to attend hockey games, and unpack the ways their twins used to be so close and then grew so apart.
The pair are all contrasts: Roman wears a rough-neck exterior that hides a sensitive, albeit emotionally aggressive personality; Dennis is fragile, bookish, pedantic, and just a little too mysterious. “I can’t make friends with a fork,” Roman says. “I hate doing things alone,” Dennis later tells him. It’s the start of some odd-couple bromance. But then Sweeney inserts a late opening-title card, which pivots Twinless into something darker, deeper, vulnerable, and more poignant without sacrificing all of the charming, warmer feelings it worked so hard to capture in its prologue. It’s not fair to explain the subsequent plot developments, except to say Dennis might not be such a random encounter and that there’s more to Rocky than just Roman’s memories of him.
A movie like this has the tendency to suggest three different ones all competing with each other. Its self-assured opening could make way for a psychological thriller that shifts hard into an impractical relationship drama––potential friction, clunky gears. But Sweeney––who, in addition to acting and directing, wrote the script––has no trouble with lubrication, layering genres atop each other in a way that’s plausible and cohesive. He’s got an acute feel for how to deploy humor and grief into the same space, especially as more backstory unwinds and the movie’s heightened stakes infiltrate the perception of his characters.
Then again, the tonal gymnastics only work with an actor flexible enough to perform them. Over his young career O’Brien hasn’t had the kind of multi-dimensional space to move around like he does here. He starts out like your typical air-headed jock (complete with a low-effort haircut) but keeps revealing more––he’s an open-hearted bro, a repressed rageaholic, and a depressive, sensitive soul looking for his lost best friend. That doesn’t even count him inhabiting Rocky for a few flashback sequences, complete with a thick mustache and effeminate voice, in which he walks just a little bit taller, wiser, sometimes meaner.
O’Brien has to effectively portray someone broken in half, unable to be glued back together, but only understood by another roaming soul missing their own half. As good as he and Sweeney are together (and as good as Aisling Franciosi is as Roman’s unexpectedly perceptive and sweet-natured girlfriend), the actor-writer-director doesn’t rely on his characters to convey everything about their bifurcated existence. He’s conscious about his blocking and has fun with cinematographer Greg Cotten’s bag of tricks, using mirrors, borders, and reflective surfaces as claustrophobic, haunting visual tools. At one point Sweeney stages a split-screen party sequence that would seem pretentious if not for the way it fuses into a devastating, isolated shot.
The formal techniques help Sweeney underline the divisive and deceitful approaches to processing grief and how people can still find enough of themselves in each other to practice forgiveness, to make someone else whole when they need it most. O’Brien tussles with that emotional whiplash in a memorable hotel room scene. Roman sits across from Dennis and pretends his friend is Rocky, unloading a litany of grievances about their relationship before transferring into a torrent of self-critical rage and sadness. “I don’t know how to be here without you,” he sobs. Sweeney’s sensitive movie offers some comforting questions in return. Is he ever supposed to? And isn’t that OK?
Twinless premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.