The reinvention of Dylan O’Brien continues with Twinless, a tale of fruitless love and stalkerish obsession aimed at the mopey Gen Z contingent but with enough meat and thrillerish darkness to satisfy most tastes.
It’s billed as a black comedy on Wikipedia (all the research I did before watching it) which seems like a bit of a stretch. Mournful, creepy and tense, I thought, especially once it gets into its stride and starts working up a sense of doomed tragic love that cannot go anywhere except to the bad.
O’Brien plays two roles – the gay, popular and dead Rocky and his twin brother, the straight, withdrawn and alive Roman – who meets Dennis (James Sweeney, who also wrote and directed) at a support group for people who have survived while their twin has not. In spite of the fact that Dennis is gay and Roman is not, the two bond over the tragic event in both their lives and in montage sequences where the two hang out and do couple-y stuff together, things start to look like they’re heading towards romance of some sort, sexuality be damned.
It’s one of the neat cross-currents writer Sweeney delivers to keep things off an even keel. Another is that Dennis is not who he says he is, and we know this from fairly early on. Twinless as a word turns out to have two meanings – the guy who is now minus his twin and the one who never had one in the first place. A stalkerish tale of self-advancement through deception starts to play out. I will say no more.
Now aged 34, O’Brien is clearly on a mission to shake off the sort of obsessives who cling on to stars of long-running TV shows like Teen Wolf (2011-2017), with a performance designed to show off his acting range. In flashbacks he’s the gay, emotional, gregarious and loud Rocky. In the present he’s the straight, tough, reserved and angry Roman. Is he slightly overdoing it, protesting too much? He is, or maybe I’m overdoing the forensics. Either way, O’Brien sports a moustache when he’s playing Rocky, just in case.
Dennis is in many ways the more interesting character, the flawed human being caught up in his own story who finds that a tiny untruth leads to more and more lying. Sweeney the writer/director propels Dennis into one situation after another where his backstory about his life with his twin starts to invite questions and where he’s surely going to get caught out. It gets quite knuckle-whitening at times.
Roman is interesting because he’s clearly not as bright or as nice as he might be, which makes him hard to root for. And Dennis is interesting because he’s a flawed character. Twinless often looks like it’s heading into the same territory as the recent Lurker – fan stalks star – and has a similar dynamic of empathising with the wrong person.
Throughout, Sweeney presents the twin relationship as an ideal: a non-sexual but incredibly tight occupying of the same space. There’s a shadow of Midnight Cowboy in his movie – a relationship across several divides – which Sweeney makes explicit in a moment where the two guys are crossing a busy road together. Dustin Hoffman’s improvised line. He likes these sort of relationships and that film in particular. As his 2015 short, Before Midnight Cowboy, made explicit and his recent romcom-of-sorts Straight Up also explored.
He’s good on awkwardness and inanity, particularly the inane things people say when they feel awkward. Twinless is full of encounters like that. And if it goes a touch flat towards the end, once the cat is finally out of the bag, it’s not really a problem. There’s plenty of good stuff here. On to the next one!
Twinless – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
