Sundance 2025 Review: TWINLESS, Enthralling, Darkly Comic, Queer-Centered Bromance

Films are often centered around a Big Lie.

 

In the case of multi-hyphenate director James Sweeney’s (Straight Up) enthrallingly dark, queer-centered comedy-drama, Twinless, it's a series of Big Lies, one bigger than the rest, that threaten to irrevocably derail Dennis’s (Sweeney) friendship with Roman (Dylan O’Brien).

 

Once one-half of twins, Roman is now a survivor struggling with overwhelming feelings of loss, guilt, and a lack of self-confidence, typical of a life-changing event like the loss of a parent or sibling. It’s made doubly worse by the sudden passing of Rocky, Roman’s far more successful, gay brother, who was their mother's favorite son by far.

 

We only meet Rocky in flashbacks, but he’s Rocky’s opposite in practically every way, and not just because Rocky favored a mustache and Roman doesn’t. Where Rocky exuded self-confidence, comfortable in his own skin as a gay man, Roman can’t find his way out of his hometown of Moscow, Idaho, or his mother’s (Lauren Graham) searing criticisms of his everyday inadequacy as a son, brother, and human being. That he decides to stay in Rocky’s adopted hometown, Portland, Oregon, might seem like a stretch logic-wise, but given the choice between Rocky’s posh, materially comfortable lifestyle åand Roman’s sadly lacking one, it’s an easy decision.

 

Where Rocky expires offscreen in the film’s opening moment, director Sweeney introduces Roman at Rocky’s well-attended funeral. In a blackly comic scene, mourners embrace Roman, sharing their feelings about the much-loved Rocky with his sadly underwhelming twin.

 

It's a perfect tone-setter for a film that straddles comedy and drama effortlessly, balancing Roman’s verbal, emotional, and intellectual limitations with Dennis, a shy, awkward young man who meets Roman at a support group for those who’ve lost their twins, leaving adult-sized gaps in their hearts and minds.

 

Dennis has the seemingly perfect in: he’s also lost a twin, Dean, and can both sympathize and empathize with Roman’s loss. He’s also perfectly positioned to act as Roman’s guide to living in a big city.

 

Later, as their friendship blossoms, they spend almost every waking moment together, right up until Sweeney introduces the proverbial second-act complication, Marcie (Aisling Franciosi), a receptionist where Dennis works. Marcie becomes an increasingly frustrated Dennis’s personal and professional foil, as well as a potential romantic interest for the incredibly straight Roman.

 

As Sweeney steadily unpacks character backstories, motivations, and their complex, complicated, contradictory interiority, Twinless transcends what otherwise could have been a narrative heavily indebted to an over-familiar plot device (the Big Lie again) to a film willing to grapple with the messy, self-destructive, irrational decisions that determine the individual fates of Dennis, Roman, and Marcie. Where Dennis’s verbal gifts, including cutting, borderline condescending commentary, are on full display from the first moment he enters Roman’s life, the decidedly non-verbal Roman lives in a constant state of anger (at himself, at Rocky, at everything he can’t control).

 

Initially underestimated by both Dennis and the audience on the other side of the screen, Marcie emerges far smarter, astute, and self-aware than either Dennis or Roman assume. Then again, surface appearances, up to and including how we present ourselves as “authentic” (social or public performance by another name), are central to the central storyline: judging others both by how we perceive them and how they want to be perceived. When both coincide, “authenticity” enters the frame.

 

On one level, Twinless unfolds as a familiar story about grief, loss, and survival, but Sweeney overlays that story, specifically Dennis and Roman’s friendship, onto one of dangerous romantic/erotic obsession. Twinless enters erotic thriller or even psychological thriller territory (e.g., Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo, especially the fixation with doubles, assumed identities, and romantic idealism, among others), but as with everything that precedes and follows the revelation of Dennis’s obsession, Sweeney deftly subverts expectations, lets the tension slowly cook until it boils, and ultimately deliver a deeply satisfying, emotionally compelling, crowd-pleasing comedy-drama, all but confirming Sweeney as a top-level talent. 

 

Twinless premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Visit the film's page on the official festival site for more information.