Sundance: A Double Dose of Dylan O'Brien In 'Twinless,' Tasty Cringe Farce For Sickos

There are worse fates than grabbing buzzy headlines during Sundance because some dopes filmed their screens and leaked videos online of your sexy leading man being sexy in your movie. So I’m not going to feel too bad for Twinless and said sexy dude Dylan O’Brien of former Teen Wolf fame—there are a lot of films that came and went at the fest without a whisper. But anybody on social media is now locked and loaded to ogle Dylan’s bum, and I’m happy to tell you all that attached to that very fine bum is a very fine and funny flick that nearly pulls a 10 on the heh-heh-sicko meter. Wins all around! (The film did actually win the Audience Award at Sundance as well, and with good reason.)

Twinless was written and directed by and stars James Sweeney (whose 2019 film Straight Up is also itself a twisted treat) as Dennis, a mopey creep whose creepiness will only be revealed by small degrees a la the frog who doesn’t realize it’s been boiled into frog soup until it’s too late. It’s fitting then that the film doesn’t kick off as being Dennis’ picture, only turning into that later on—instead we start off following Roman (O’Brien), a colorless heterosexual mumbler who’s attending the funeral of his twin gay brother Rocky who’s just been run over by a car and killed.

The no doubt traumatic but also highly specific and odd experience of losing one’s twin is immediately underlined with humor by the film as each mourner that comes up to Roman flinches and freaks out, thinking for a second that they’re seeing the dead brother risen again. It only seems natural from there, after indulging that, that Roman would immediately have to go to therapy. And here that takes the form of a support group filled with other twins who also are grieving the loss of their own siblings.

At one such meeting of this group is where Roman meets Dennis (Sweeney), a gay whose straight twin also happened to die recently. And the two young men immediately hit it off—you get the sense that there’s a little bit of the other filling in the role of their deceased loved one. Kind of a Strangers on a Train thing. Criss cross. Just with alternating sexualities and dead kin. Totally natural.

Soon enough though Twinless is borrowing from another Hitchcock picture, giving us a mid-film flashback a la Vertigo that will reveal and un-do all that we thought we knew up to that point. And which quickly turns this budding bromance into a deep mad frenzy of all kinds of perversion. Hysterically so! It’s way more Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead than it is Notorious—more Chuck & Buck than To Catch a Thief. Twinless is really just a fresh (freshly deranged) spin on the classic ancient text of an imposter whose lies to keep their stories afloat become ever wackier as they pile and pile up, until their inevitable tumble. Houses of cards will come crashing down! Hearts will be broken! Toes will be sucked!

It’s a tasty mess—where the worst choices are chosen by its characters at every single turn. And Sweeney and O’Brien tear into their sicko material with hellacious gusto. O’Brien especially, who gets to play two roles with both Rocky and Roman involved in the full sweep of the story, and manages to two totally believable and distinct persona—he even gets to be deeply moving when it’s called for, and nails it. Ace star-making work from a formerly under-valued twunk. Twinless is Farce-adjacent you could say, although the Solondzian darkness of its deeply fucked-up material keeps it from ever feeling a true Farce’s sense of bubbly effervescence—call it Cringe Farce. And it’s two times a winner.