So many romantic comedies are built on deception – misunderstandings or outright lies that spiral out of control until the fates of hearts and bodies hang in the balance. If you think about it, the same is true of psychological thrillers; sometimes the primary difference is the degree to which deception can be forgiven (and maybe, as such, the picture-perfect handsomeness or beauty of the deceiver in question). James Sweeney’s Twinless does not neatly inhabit either of those genres; it would be simplest to classify it as either. Yet Sweeney seems to instinctively understand the obsessiveness, somewhere between quirk and kink, that might twine them together. After writing and directing 2020’s Straight Up, an inventive and underseen romantic comedy that embraced speedy-banter bona fides and Academy-ratio framing in order to rewrite the baseline assumptions of its genre, he has made one the best and least easily classifiable films of the year.
This means, of course, that to say to much about Twinless risks spoiling some of its unpredictability – though a faint awareness of one particular turn didn’t detract from my experience (nor did it enhance my ability to guess what might happen next). Nevertheless, let’s tread carefully. Roman (Dylan O’Brien) is grieving the recent loss of his identical twin brother. In vivid, brief scenelets, we see him clashing with his bereaved mother (Lauren Graham, presumably recruited by Straight Up’s Gilmore Girls endorsement); frustrated with the sorting of his dead brother Rocky’s affairs in a city where Roman doesn’t (yet) reside; and attending a support group with darkly amusing specificity – for twins mourning their lost counterpart.
One of the movie’s few missteps is a slightly bizarre conflation of twins in general and identical twins in particular; the former seems to barely exist in the film, with no one ever seeking to clarify whether or not Roman and Rocky (or any other mentioned pairs) were identical or fraternal. Then again, most people probably do think of identical twins as “real” twins, and that ability to capture the collective imagination is probably what Sweeney is getting at by ignoring other, less flashy variations. The support group exists, the movie implies, because of that perceived specialness.
The largely unhelpful group, where the moderator tries out a stand-up routine on her captive audience, is where Roman meets Dennis (James Sweeney). In their grief, they strike up an unlikely friendship. Roman is sweetly dim – “not the brightest tool in the shed,” he admits in one of several malapropisms – while Dennis, like Sweeny’s character in Straight Up, is hyperverbal and banter-addicted, though with an even stronger current of loneliness, which we can see thrumming with low-key hostility in small talk with his open-hearted coworker Marcie (Aisling Franciosi). Roman is also straight, while Dennis is gay; this seems to draw Roman further into Dennis’s orbit, because Rocky was gay, too, and he regrets not staying closer to his brother in adulthood. Unsure of what else to do together, they get sandwiches, go grocery shopping, and watch each other’s backs.
The bond between Roman and Dennis is at once pure and perverse, for reasons that become increasingly clear after not too much time. And though the movie’s plot depends on strategic concealment of certain information, it doesn’t feel constrained by the wait for all the characters to catch up with each other. It’s a potentially formulaic situation in a world that doesn’t adhere to formula. Perhaps hoping to avoid the feeling that he’s manipulating these characters, Sweeney doesn’t block and choreography the many dialogue scenes with the same single-take geometric precision as Straight Up, where the cinematography reflected his character’s fastidiousness. But his concise edits remain in place, and certain shots are still dazzlingly clever, as when a shot tracking two characters walking down the street pulls back to reveal that it’s actually another character’s point of view from within a car, driving alongside the others. Sweeney, as a director, is also fond of split screen; between his use of that device and the determination to treat twins as an uncanny mirror image, there’s more than a hint of Brian De Palma, even as Sweeney the actor maintains a quippy persona that might fit on a cable hangout sitcom.
That’s not a knock – though maybe it’s an admission that Sweeney is a little wobblier in his more emotional scenes. That could also be an unfair comparison, though, skewed by the fact that O’Brien, in his dual role, is a revelation: sweet, sad, vulnerable, startlingly raw, all without overwhelming the fact that for much of its runtime Twinless is laugh-out-loud funny. Like Straight Up, it engages with fantasies of self that go beyond the simplicity of debunking ideas of storybook romance (or the perhaps less universal but still potent fantasy of a secret-language twin to share in our adventures). Real twins aren’t magical or menacing, just a fact of nature. Yet they do seem to provide some kind of shortcut to an understanding so many people yearn for. Sweeney’s film, his second high-achieving, high-wire act in a row, lives on the line between yearning and helpless fixation.
Twinless plays again at the Tribeca Festival on June 10 and June 14.
Director: James Sweeney Writer: James Sweeney Starring: Dylan O’Brien, James Sweeney, Aisling Franciosi Release Date: June 7, 2025 (Tribeca); September 5, 2025 (theatrical)
