‘Twinless’ Review: An Uneasy Dark Comedy About the Fear of Being Alone

I used to be We. Now I’m Me.” Grammatically, the sentence may be off, but emotionally it hits exactly the right note. Twinless, as the title suggests, revolves around a striking yet very real phenomenon: the experience of twins who lose their other half. That loss can happen in many ways—before birth, during delivery, in childhood, or, as depicted here, in adulthood, when the bond has already been fully formed and deeply ingrained. For someone who has spent an entire life alongside a kind of second self, that absence can be even harder to process than the loss of a sibling in more conventional terms.

Twinless, however, has little interest in approaching this subject through the usual framework of family melodrama. At first, it almost feels like a familiar indie comedy, hovering somewhere between deadpan absurdity and the soft melancholy long associated with the Sundance brand of storytelling. But that expectation doesn’t last. When James Sweeney—who both directs and stars in the film—finally settles on a mode, what he delivers is a hybrid of dark comedy and suspense, a film that carefully builds a structure only to gradually dismantle it over the course of a lean, intriguingly offbeat 100 minutes.

The film opens in Portland with a death heard but not seen: the screech of brakes, the impact of a crash. Soon after, we meet Roman (Dylan O’Brien), attending the funeral of his twin brother, Rocky, who was killed in the accident. The funeral itself is strange in a quietly funny way and immediately establishes the film’s tone. Friends of Rocky—many of whom have never met Roman—are visibly shaken by his presence (“I feel like I’m greeting a ghost,” one of them says). Roman, meanwhile, is clearly overwhelmed, not only by the loss itself but by the unsettling reactions it provokes in others. That emotional overload leads him to attend a support group for people who have lost their twins—an actual kind of group, presented here with a mix of gentle humor and low-key absurdity.

It’s there that Roman meets Dennis (played by Sweeney), another twin whose brother also died in a car accident a few months earlier. They connect cautiously, become friends, and, despite their glaringly different personalities, begin to ease each other’s loneliness. Another parallel links them: Roman’s late brother was gay, while Dennis’s situation is inverted—his twin, Dean, was straight, and Dennis is gay. The bond between them feels natural, as if each were, in some way, standing in for the missing brother the other can no longer reach. Or maybe it’s something more complicated than that.

Just as the film seems to settle into this dynamic, Sweeney pulls the rug out from under it. About twenty minutes in, the opening credits appear, the perspective shifts from Roman to Dennis, the narrative jumps back in time, and much of what we thought we understood is subtly recontextualized. Without spoiling those turns, it’s enough to say that from this point on, Twinless drifts into darker, creepier territory. The characters grow more troubling, the atmosphere more uneasy, and the story increasingly tangled in secrets and deception. Still, the film never entirely loses sight of its emotional core: a fear of loneliness, of having no friends, no love, no one who truly understands you—of lacking that twin, literal or symbolic, with whom intimacy feels effortless and absolute.

Sweeney takes a considerable risk by abandoning the emotional clarity and accessibility of a more conventional narrative in favor of something murkier and more unsettling. What begins as a quirky comedy about an unlikely friendship between two very different men—both, in a sense, “orphaned twins”—slowly morphs into something more disturbing. It becomes a story about the questionable, sometimes unsettling things people are willing to do for love, companionship, or simply to avoid being alone in a world they don’t quite know how to navigate by themselves.

Not all of Sweeney’s choices land equally well. At times, the film prioritizes plot mechanics—misunderstandings, deceptions, the escalating risks created by lies—over the relationship at its center, pushing Twinless toward a more generic thriller mode. But Sweeney seems to embrace this as part of the experiment, using the story’s emotional nucleus as a springboard for something closer to a Hitchcockian exercise—occasionally nodding to Brian De Palma, particularly through split screens and other visual flourishes—and letting it unfold with both expected and unexpected consequences.

O’Brien plays Roman as a blunt, emotionally stunted man with limited verbal skills, aggressively heterosexual, and visibly unraveling under the weight of grief. He also embodies Rocky, his twin, as a sharply contrasting presence. Sweeney, meanwhile, delivers a performance far more layered and unsettling than it initially appears. The two actors share strong chemistry, grounding a relationship between opposites that is held together, at least at first, by a shared emotional void. Aisling Franciosi adds a compelling third presence as Marcie, a receptionist at Dennis’s workplace who gradually becomes entangled in their bond. If viewers are willing to adjust their expectations and accept the film’s tonal transformation, Twinless reveals itself as what it ultimately aims to be: an uneasy, existential dark comedy about the fear of being alone.