There are films that politely observe grief from a safe distance, and then there are films like Twinless—the sort that climb inside your ribcage, rummage around in the vulnerable bits, and dare you to keep breathing. It’s a pitch-black comedy that moves with the pulse of a ghost: warm one moment, cruel the next, always haunted by the ache of what’s missing. It shouldn’t work—grief and humour aren’t supposed to hold hands this tightly—but James Sweeney directs with such fearless emotional clarity that the tightrope never snaps.
Roman’s world is split in half the day his twin brother Rocky dies in a violent street accident. The loss doesn’t just break him—it pulls the gravity from his life. He walks through the days as though he’s permanently underwater, convinced that if he had just said one more thing—something kinder, something braver—maybe his brother would still be here. Regret becomes a second skeleton inside him. And so, desperate for meaning, to understand his grief, for connection, for someone who understands the shape of this brutal fracture, he joins a support group for people who have lost twins.
That’s where Dennis appears—awkward, overeager, strangely magnetic. The two meet at a support group where he claims to be a fellow “twinless twin,” but his story doesn’t quite sit right. You're not quite sure about him, and the things he says, which makes him an enigma to the audience, but you appreciate the bond they share, and their blossoming friendship, so you route for it. But all is not what it seems with Dennis, and viewers eventually find out he's been manipulating the truth, and hiding things from Roman—things he should not have hidden, in order to get closer to him. But his guilt doesn’t stop him from becoming addicted to Roman’s companionship. In fact, it’s the very reason he needs it. The tragedy becomes his nourishment.
There is no melodrama here, no sentimental manipulation. Sweeney’s screenplay understands something deeply uncomfortable about human nature: people do terrible things not because they’re cartoon villains, but because they’re terrified of being alone, and facing themselves in that empty space. Dennis isn’t a monster. He’s simply someone who believes that love is a thing you’re allowed to steal if the universe never offered it willingly. That makes his behaviour unforgivable—but painfully understandable. That duality drives the film’s tension like a fuse line.
The black comedy is viciously sharp. There are moments so outrageous, so dangerously inappropriate, you almost hate yourself for laughing—but the humour isn’t here to undercut the pain. It’s a survival mechanism. People grieving say wild things. They laugh at the wrong moments. They use jokes as sandbags to hold back the flood. This film gets that. It doesn’t tidy grief into something tasteful. It lets it be feral, and in all its lies, ironically, allows it to be its most truthful to humanity.
Dylan O’Brien is extraordinary. This is the performance I’ve been waiting for from him—raw, unguarded, quietly soulful. His Roman is a man trying to carry on with half his identity missing, clinging to the memory of the only person who truly understood him. He plays grief not as a dramatic eruption but as a persistent state of disrepair. You see it in the slack of his posture, in the way silence hurts him more than violent noise. He’s quietly magnificent.
But it’s James Sweeney—writer, director, and performer as Dennis—who detonates the film’s emotional charge. His character is beautifully constructed: lonely, deeply flawed, frighteningly dependent, yet never stripped of humanity. Watching him lie is like watching someone build a prison around themselves brick by brick—fully aware they’re trapping their only remaining hope inside with them. Sweeney’s instincts as a filmmaker are impeccable; he knows exactly when to let a scene breathe and when to pull the emotional knife.
The film teeters on the edge of emotional annihilation, but its heart never corrodes. In fact, that’s what makes it so powerful: beneath the darkness is a film that still believes in connection. Not clean reconciliation. Not cheap forgiveness. Just two broken people who can, for a fleeting moment, acknowledge each other’s pain. The final scene—a simple conversation over sandwiches—lands harder than any explosion. No speeches. No redemption arcs. Just two men accepting that grief can destroy bridges, but sometimes it leaves a narrow path across.
Twinless is human to the point of discomfort. It laughs in the dark and cries in daylight. It sees people at their worst and still argues they’re worth understanding. It’s devastating, wickedly funny, and honestly one of the most emotionally intelligent films I’ve seen in a long time. It never tries to tidy up the mess of grief—and maybe that’s why it lingers. It feels lived in. It feels real. And some part of me won’t be the same after it.
This one’s going to stay with me.
9/10
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