“I can’t control this mixture of anger and hurt,” a character says in James Sweeney’s dark and darkly funny sophomore turn, Twinless. There is a lot brimming under the surface threatening to claw its way out: emotions that you are taught to repress, lies that you have concocted in order to get what you want. Going into Twinless completely blind is best. There is a difference between grief and loneliness even if the second part usually accompanies the first. What we do with loneliness and how we try to cure that in ourselves is a main theme throughout Sweeney’s film, but the two lead characters, played by Sweeney and an astonishing Dylan O’Brien, take very different paths from one another. Twinless is smart, unexpected, and original.
When one of your earliest scenes takes place in a grief support group, some directors would have a hard time bringing the energy back up as the narrative develops but not Sweeney. The leader of this twin grief sessions asks everyone in the circle to go around and reveal one thing they don’t miss about their twin. It’s a risky thing to ask people, but it immediately lets us know the tone Sweeney is striving for. We see him, too, sitting in the circle with his hair all messy and unwashed as he looks at O’Brien’s Roman as he is welcomed into the group.
“You get me,” Roman tells Dennis as they joke while grocery shopping and discover questions that they never bothered to ask their respective brothers. Roman didn’t meet anyone that his brother, Rocky, dated, and maybe he feels like he is trying to do right by befriending another gay person (even if Dennis jokes about it). They see things in pairs because they have always been with another, but there is a sorrowful haze hanging over their burgeoning friendship. Are both young men afraid that they lost a brother but then are nervous about replacing the one that they lost?
We see a clear difference in Roman and Rocky. Inside of the surviving twin lies a wayward rage that intensifies after Rocky’s death. Roman lashes out at his mother (played by Lauren Graham) and small inconveniences become angry outburts. When we see O’Brien as Rocky in flashbacks, his gait and demeanor are gentler and flirtatious. There is an unspoken ease within himself that I couldn’t help but wonder if Roman was jealous or even aware of. O’Brien’s Roman lets the tidal waves of emotions crash into him, and we are gifted one of the year’s rawest and most complex performances.
Sweeney does not get the credit he deserves as an actor probably because he has such a way with dialogue and how characters confront each other. His first feature, Straight Up, could’ve been written off as simply quirky, but he always grounds his characters with brutal honesty even if they are lying over and over to other people. You can see those truths trying to be released from his body even if his words say otherwise.
Sweeney proves that he is the real deal with Twinless. It’s daring feat to make a film that makes us shake together our feelings of sadness with so much intelligent humor.
Twinless is in select theaters now.
