Twinless: Dylan O’Brien plumbs hidden depths in a delightfully unpredictable dark comedy

How do you make sense of your identity after losing an identical twin? How do you see yourself without your mirror image? Writer-director James Sweeney uses these questions to examine grief in unexpected ways. Adding to the recent slew of films and TV shows about doubles and twins (Sinners, Mickey 17, The Shrouds…), Twinless takes the theme in a fresh direction. This is no ordinary story about loss. Sweeney delights in wrong-footing his audience and mining dark humour from strange places. When you surrender to its twists – including a flashback that turns the plot on its head – it’s quite a ride.

It begins with an off-beat meet-cute: at a twin bereavement support group, Roman (Dylan O’Brien) and Dennis (James Sweeney) lock eyes. The pair share a state of twinlessness, but have little else in common. Dennis is slight, quick-witted and queer; hetero gym-bro Roman is, in his own words, “not the brightest tool in the shed”. These differences make for a charming back-and-forth, Dennis’s knowing sarcasm softened by Roman’s oblivious sincerity.

The pair form a brotherly bond, but their dynamic is imbalanced: Dennis harbours some hefty secrets, and grows increasingly possessive of his new friend. When Roman starts dating the bubbly, perceptive Marcie (Aisling Franciosi), Dennis’s carefully constructed persona crumbles in ways both hilarious and unsettling.

In Sweeney’s screwball-spirited debut, Straight Up (2019), a gay man (Sweeney himself) tries to deny his sexuality by entering a relationship with a woman (Katie Findlay). His follow-up continues this interest in complicated partnerships. In both, Sweeney writes, directs and plays the lead, but the two features are more like cousins than twins. Unlike the earlier film, Twinless veers closer to drama than straight-up comedy, and it is the better for it. 

The jokes don’t always land: there’s a self-conscious cleverness to Sweeney’s brand of deadpan drollery that occasionally rings false. Instead, the film is at its best when it’s earnest, delivering some real gut punches when its characters get honest with themselves and each other. O’Brien gives a particularly affecting performance, embodying an intense vulnerability.

Beneath the shocking gear-shifts and dry one-liners of Twinless lies a tender story about two lonely souls searching for a companion to lighten life’s burdens – someone to do the food shopping with, to hold the other end of a fitted sheet. Dennis and Roman may not be identical, but they become each other’s mirror, even when they don’t recognise their reflection.

► Twinless is in UK cinemas 6 February.