Aunt Peg wrote: Sun Aug 17, 2025 2:52 pm
Another fan of Twinless here, so much so I went home and purchased his first film Straight Up (2019) one of the many films lost in the early days of the pandemic and it was nearly as great as Twinless. Both films have whip smart dialogue, vividly drawn characters (even those with just a scene or two) and are technically beautifully crafted. James Sweeney with his first two films is I think the major actor/writer/director to emerge over the last few years. Go in blind to these films - particularly Twinless. The surprises are wonderfully rewarding. A treat from start to finish.
James Sweeney's excellent
Twinless is now streaming, and I can echo the praise
zedz and
Aunt Peg have for it. Clearly
Straight Up was no fluke; for me
Twinless confirms Sweeney as a major new voice in American cinema. And a triple threat, no less! His two features, which he's written, directed, and starred in, feature the same whip-smart writing while working in considerably different keys.
As with
Straight Up, Sweeney's fundamental subject is modern alienation/loneliness and the desire for connection. In both films he approaches this through an offbeat psychology. In
Straight Up, it's that of a gay man who attempts to reject the homosexuality from which he feels estranged and maintain a platonic romantic relationship with a woman. Here, it's with
a character intensely obsessed with twins and the idea of having a twin as a cure for his loneliness, even to the point of being sexually aroused by twin talk.
As such, where
Straight Up leans into screwball/romantic comedy,
Twinless enters considerably darker territory. But Sweeney doesn't abandon his humor at all, and the explorations and resolutions in each film are of a piece.
Like
Straight Up,
Twinless is built around a duo, but the dynamics of each duo are quite different from one another. Sweeney and Findlay's voluble soul mate relationship in the earlier film was comparable to that of twins, whereas here Sweeney's character Dennis is more reticent (for reasons that become clear as the story goes on), and Dylan O'Brien's Roman is a recognizable heterosexual male type—masculine, withdrawn, sensitive, lonely—unlike anything in the earlier film. Aisling Franciosi is a delight as Dennis's chipper "loser" co-worker who enters the film later, and her personality and the specific ways she relates to Dennis and Roman naturally change the film's balance (a great example of Aunt Peg's observation about vividly drawn characters). O'Brien, though, is something of a revelation. Not only does he tackle two roles in playing two vastly different twins, but as Roman he's able to play convincingly dull-witted, and the one-take monologue he delivers halfway through the film is a seriously impressive bit of acting in which his character lets loose a torrent of pent-up emotions and struggles against/through his own limits. (Needless to say, it's an impressive piece of writing as well.)
Formally, both of Sweeney's films make creative use of split-screen to present and compare different perspectives. The centerpiece usage of the technique in
Twinless is a party sequence in which the split-screen allows Sweeney an economical way of sketching out the characters' inevitable distancing via the juxtaposition of a failed gay flirtation with a successful straight one, setting up the triangle that will drive the second half of the story. There's also a lovely composition later in the film that makes it look as though a character on a phone call with a couple is sharing a bed with them—an image that combines third wheeling and palpable longing while typifying the film's motifs of complete and incomplete pairs. Both films are beautifully shot by DP Greg Cotten, and I find there to be something subtly distinct in the way Sweeney and Cotten shoot apartments & hotels. It's difficult to put one's finger on, but there's something vaguely sad and empty about the air of quiet and the Instagram/Airbnb-pretty sterility in many of these spaces, which accentuates the characters' own lack of emotional fulfillment.
Sweeney's perspective and discourse on sexuality could fill another post, but suffice it to say it's unique, interesting, and profound. Given this, it is something of a mystery to me why he's flown relatively under the radar in a cultural moment that typically seeks to amplify queer voices. (No write-ups in
Reverse Shot or
The New Yorker at the time of this writing.) Luckily
Twinless does seem to be getting noticed at least a bit more than
Straight Up, which I don't think even received a Blu-ray. Both of these films are original, colorful, idiosyncratic, wickedly funny, and offer just a plain good time at the movies. See them!
