There are many things said about Drake that are probably accurate and subsequently very embarrassing. However, I may just come to his defense when it comes to the ghostwriting rumor. His passion for identical twins recurs so often in his lines that any right-minded, mono-embryo writer would probably give pause to a public obsession. “If you had a twin, I’d still choose you,” Drake romanticizes in Rihanna’s “Work,” perhaps the cleanest depiction of his kink. In the faux-ally “Girls Want Girls,” he boasts, “I got two pretty bitches…they got matching Benz and matching APs, now they can really call each other twins.” And more recently and regrettably: “Yeah they twins, I could tell their ass apart.”
It’s probably a fetish schtick, like Jay-Z’s occasional mention of “breastes”-play and Childish Gambino’s several shout-outs to Asian women all over Camp. But if you were to think that James Sweeney’s Twinless as an isolated form of attraction, Drake will beg to differ. Heck, I’d even bet that Drake will find Twinless amusing, much like the bigger audience that will get to experience Sweeney’s dark humor for the first time.
Sweeney plays Dennis, a lonely man who meets a grieving Roman (Dylan O’Brien) at a twin-loss support group. They connect – particularly because Roman’s twin Rocky was also gay. Though both seem emotionally numb, their words of bereavement are piercing. “Every day is a bad day now,” Dennis shares at a meeting when he reveals that his womb-half Dean died in a car accident. A pained Roman, who is written like a well-meant het-himbo (“I’m not the brightest tool in the shed,” he admits to Dennis, who adapts to biting his tongue when Roman continuously confuses idioms later in the film), gives Dennis a wink of encouragement.
Cue the record scratch. The next scene is a flashback with a malicious reveal: Dennis has met Rocky (O’Brien with a ‘stache) before. They have a sexual rendezvous followed by a touching pillow-talk. Both activities revolve around Rocky’s twinhood with Roman, who is deemed as the “good twin.” While Dennis confesses to an attraction to twins, it may not be the sole factor behind Dennis’s unwillingness to let go of Rocky following that night. Ignoring all the signs that he is most likely being ghosted, Dennis gets into a rageful, stalkerish confrontation with Rocky on the street. Without completing his justification, Rocky is then fatally hit by a car.
So Dennis meeting Roman is not serendipitous. Dennis also doesn’t have a twin. This is part of Dennis’s sequence of unfortunate bad decision-making that makes their developing friendship based on a very terrible lie, one in which Roman probably won’t take too lightly once he finds out. It’s a big-stakes plot device, but Sweeney is not afraid to splinter his character into jealousy, rudeness, and patheticism in the name of storytelling. Is the point of the film about the magnetism of twins? Not quite. Twinless sets the table for the understandable concept that losing a twin is a grief that 3% of the world’s population will know about, but we find that the pain of being alone is the main course.
It’s not a surprise, given that Sweeney’s first film Straight Up also stems from a man’s fear of loneliness through neurotic tendencies and harsh quips. But the fast-paced wordplay in Straight Up is boiled down to meaningful deliveries of silence, pain, and misunderstood emotions between Dennis and Roman. They spend more time listening to each other instead of fighting to be the scene’s supreme wisecrack. I had expected Sweeney’s sophomore effects to replicate his usual flow, but I’m pleasantly surprised to see that he instead takes a stab at making a movie.
The result? Admittedly, movies where the plot’s momentum is fueled by a lie are not my cup of tea. While it might seem like the kind of mortified experience that I Love My Dad makes you go through, Sweeney locks in on the characters’ brokenness. Sure, Dennis is sorta crazy for going through with this lie, but Roman’s no saint, either: he becomes physically violent and shouts at others, before attempting to bandage the situation with apologies that water down over time. Even if the likelihood of them knowing each other would have been low if Dennis had not been implicated in Rocky’s death, it’s amusing to watch the two characters together, especially against the setting of more emotionally adjusted people (women, I’d like to add). Like the halves of two different broken hearts, they sorta fit together.
Twinless loses steam when it becomes Dennis’s emotional shitshow, especially when O’Brien gives the most riveting performance of his career thus far. But this is a movie about an emotional shitshow, which means that there is more effort in promotion and interview circuits. Some of our trendiest queer writers have been packaged and shipped to studio TV lots, but I want to see movie posters of gay dilemmas and crippling heartache all over theaters. Millennial mothers will drop to their knees at O’Brien’s sex scenes, Drake will rap something like “Everyone is either twinless or will die twinless / But I pray that I find my soul-fetus, God’s witness”, and Sweeney will continue to grow in successful character-floundering.
Twinless
2025
dir. James Sweeney
100 min.
Opens Friday, 9/5 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square Cinema, West Newton Cinema, Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport, and AMC Boston Common
