The film features characters that are so nuanced that they feel real.
I recently watched the new film Twinless, a brilliant, fast-paced, and fluff-free movie wherein every minor detail is relevant. (The movie derives a lot of its excellence from its dark twists and thus is best enjoyed without knowing too much, so those who plan on watching it should probably just stop reading here.) The plot is elaborate and yet plausible, since the script makes the characters so nuanced that we can imagine them as real people.
Put very simply, Twinless, which is directed by James Sweeney, is about two clingy men who attend a support group for twins who have lost their twin. Roman, a dumb but benevolent jock grieving the loss of his gay twin, Rocky, befriends the judgy and witty Dennis. However, Roman is not aware that Rocky and Dennis knew each other. Roman, a simple guy who “likes boobs” and just wants a “nice girl,” is introduced to Dennis’s coworker Marcie; she’s a cheery person, the type who sees the glass as half full even when it’s empty. Dennis feels like an appendage as they fall in love, and Marcie — a warm extrovert who is surprisingly smart and remembers the little details about people — realizes Dennis’s stories don’t always add up.
The philosophical idea entertained throughout the film is the notion of an identity crisis. Roman doesn’t know who he is without his identical twin, saying, “If you [Rocky] weren’t like me, and we weren’t the same, then . . . I wouldn’t know who I was.” (Likewise, Rocky mentions that “I was ‘we’ and now I’m ‘I.’”) By contrast, Dennis has something like multiple personality disorder and doesn’t know “what version” of himself to be. (It’s a “defense mechanism” to play somebody else, he says after briefly pretending to be British during an encounter at a grocery store to avoid being recognized.) Dennis is a compulsive liar, the kind who unnecessarily tells an apartment’s security woman over the intercom that he’s with UPS to deliver a package when he could just say he’s there to visit someone. Dennis explicitly reveals how he gets away with his elaborate claims: “The trick is to say something that is emotionally true but factually false,” he admits during an icebreaker game. (Rocky was able to identify Dennis as a “liar” rather quickly by initiating a conversation in Japanese, a language Dennis claimed to understand, and nevertheless they continue spending the evening together.) But Dennis lies for a purpose, namely, to get close to an individual.
The film’s two most prominent emotional themes — grief and male loneliness — are obvious. In Roman’s captivating monologue, we watch a tour de force through the five stages of grief. Although she’s hardly onscreen, Roman and Rocky’s mother shows us a withdrawn form of mourning by refusing to get out of bed on Christmas Day. Loneliness is approached from two angles, fraternal and romantic. Dennis fails to be a surrogate for Rocky in Roman’s life, and Roman can’t substitute Rocky for Dennis. (Rocky, too, admits struggling with loneliness because he’s always “giving.”) Although we feel sorry for them, we also see that male loneliness is slightly self-imposed. Rocky and Roman drifted apart and seemingly both wanted to reconnect but never put in the effort, while Marcie is genuinely nice to Dennis, but he discounts her as sort of a “loser.” Similarly, Dennis is introduced to potential mates, yet he’s distracted and hardly engages with them.
Despite these heavy topics, the movie isn’t depressing because it contains light, ironic comedic moments. During the holidays, the mother briefly stops screaming in the kitchen and pokes her head out to calmly say, “Do you guys want wine with dinner?” At the support group for twin-free twins, everybody shudders when Dennis posits that “maybe twin identity is really just a construct, like gender?”
Consistent with the notion of having a near-identical copy, the movie is replete with subversive parallels. Dennis and Rocky have an intimate chat under the covers, just as Roman and Marcie do. Roman played The Sims with his brother growing up, then accidentally kills the Sim character Rocky (“Deepest sympathy! ROCKY has just died,” says the video game), and dresses up as a Sim character with Dennis for a Halloween party. Roman and Rocky’s last conversation was about socks, so Dennis buys Roman socks for Christmas. It strikes us as overdramatic when Roman beats up guys who called him and Dennis “faggots,” but we learn that Roman deeply regrets calling Rocky a “faggot” years earlier because that caused them to drift apart. Roman had yelled at his mother while going through the stuff left in Rocky’s apartment, and when he yells at Marcie while looking for one of Rocky’s old sweaters, he softens and apologizes.
Roman has a tendency to express malapropisms, mixing up “ladder move” for “lateral move” and saying “I know I’m not, like, the brightest tool in the shed” as opposed to “sharpest tool in the shed” or “brightest bulb in the box.” Roman says “if you’re going to hell, keep going” to Dennis, an ominous message that applies to both Roman’s inability to self-correct and Dennis’s digging himself into a deeper hole of lies. But later, when Roman says the same to Marcie, she gently corrects him and notes that the quote from Winston Churchill is actually “if you’re going through hell, keep going,” which represents his journey of improvement through his relationship with Marcie. (Once he’s dating, Roman ditches the hoodies and looks more put together.)
The parallels and details (like Roman’s misuse of language throughout the film) add depth to the characters and allow us to piece things together. Dennis always seems to know things he shouldn’t. When he correctly guesses that Roman is wearing Rocky’s shirt, Roman says, “How’d you know?” Dennis’s boss makes it abundantly clear that she never talks about her personal life at work, yet the office throws her a birthday party (she says, “How did you guys know?”) and Dennis tells her to enjoy a concert that she’s attending but never mentioned. Likewise, when Dennis gets Marcie an Olive Garden gift card for Christmas, she says, “I freaking love the Olive Garden! How did you know?” We eventually learn that Dennis was fired, and we assume that the boss (and perhaps other coworkers) recognized his obsessive, invasive tendencies.
Tension builds so that you anticipate a high-stakes ending; by opening the film with a dramatic death and Dennis becoming increasingly extreme as the scenes pass, we expect something equally grand at the end. It concludes with an anticlimactic conversation in a diner — but again, the parallels throughout add context that render this simple scene rather profound. It is presumably the same diner where Dennis met Rocky, where Dennis and Roman got dinner after the support group, and just outside where Rocky was killed. Dennis had previously asked Rocky about his relationship with Roman, “What’s the longest sentence you’ve ever said in unison?” (The answer? “All that she wants is another bagel.”) When they are friends under false pretenses, Dennis and Roman repeatedly answer in disunity, like when asked whether they’re paying “together or separate.” At the very end, Dennis incidentally fulfills his promise to Rocky about “amend[ing] your broken township” by (finally) being honest and genuine. Dennis recalls that, as children, Rocky broke his foot and Roman deliberately broke his own so that his twin wouldn’t have to suffer alone; Roman realizes that Dennis must have had some intimate conversations with Rocky to know this anecdote. (Another subtle detail is that Dennis now has a broken arm because he deliberately tried to injure himself — or maybe commit suicide — in the same fashion that Rocky was killed, and Rocky had previously warned Dennis that he’d get a broken bone soon.) Dennis tells Roman that he was “the good twin” in Rocky’s eyes. When the waitress appears, Dennis and Roman are finally synchronized, “Can we get a box to go?” We conclude that Dennis and Roman must have some genuine connection and their friendship wasn’t a complete farce, but that they’re planning to walk away and take what they can from their tumultuous experience.
Twinless is stimulating — intellectually, visually, and emotionally. Here, I’ve only described a portion of the nuances in the movie. I wish I could watch it again for the first time and re-experience the thrilling shock, but Twinless is even better a second time because the attention to detail becomes more pronounced. The only flaw, according to a puritan like me, is the 15 or so seconds of pornography (and if you fast-forward, you’ll miss some relevant dialogue). I conclude by reiterating what Armond White said in one of his rare glowing reviews: “If Twinless isn’t a popular hit, our movie culture doesn’t deserve to have hits.”