Twinless Film Review — How Far Can Loneliness and Grief Take You?
James Sweeney’s second feature presents itself as a dark comedy and holds that line even as it deals with grief, consent, friendship and loneliness. The film stays alert to how quickly grief can become both leverage and a moral pass.
Roman (Dylan O’Brien) has lost his identical twin brother, Rocky, in a car accident that happens off screen. He still lives with his mother, played by Lauren Graham, and an early scene around Rocky’s funeral establishes their relationship quickly. Their exchanges are sharp, unresolved, and strained well beyond the shock of recent loss. At her prompting, Roman begins attending a support group for bereaved twins.
At the group, Roman meets Dennis (James Sweeney). On paper, they are mismatched. Roman is blunt, volatile, physically imposing; Dennis is soft-spoken, emotionally fluent, openly gay. Their connection forms quickly, carried by shared loss and the relief of not having to explain it. They drift into habits — errands, sandwiches, empty afternoons. What seemingly draws them together is not only grief, but the sudden absence of a very specific bond: the person who has been there since the start of your life.
The plot twists early, and more than once. Parts of Dennis’s story do not quite align. Small inconsistencies surface as he builds a web of lies, half-truths and omissions, and his actions quietly begin to steer the narrative.
As the story tightens, Dennis’s construction begins to collapse. Each revelation peels back another layer, and the closer Roman gets to the centre, the more it stings. What begins as an uneasy friendship curdles into something more dangerous. Dennis shifts from victim to manipulator to something darker still. His punishment is severe and narratively earned, but it does not simplify him. The film resists reducing either man to a single explanation. In their shared desire to escape the void of loneliness, Dennis becomes an uneasy mirror to Roman.
Roman is not written as an eloquent mourner, and O’Brien grounds the role with physical credibility. He plays Roman with the clenched energy of a man used to proving himself through action rather than articulation. He moves with reflexes of someone permanently braced for impact. As Rocky — O’Brien plays both twins — he carries himself differently, lighter and quicker, with an ease Roman never learned. Sweeney, who wrote Dennis for himself, plays the role with calculated charm. He can be funny, attentive, disarming, but he is constantly adjusting. Dennis wants to be liked so badly that he keeps reinventing what is likable.
Roman’s mother, played by Lauren Graham, strikes a brittle balance between grief, love and an inability to communicate supportively. The scenes at the funeral and later at Christmas make it clear why Roman would cling to any version of acceptance offered to him. She exerts pressure where comfort might be expected, speaking in corrections and disappointments.
Aisling Franciosi delivers a quietly impressive performance as Marcy, Roman’s co-worker and new girlfriend. She enters the film gently and grows in importance. Marcy gives Roman something his mother cannot: careful listening, almost maternal in its warmth. She also notices what others choose to ignore. She clocks the gaps in Dennis’s stories, the off-vibe that keeps being smoothed over, and treats truth as a principle. She becomes a moral counterweight to Dennis.
The danger in Dennis is not simply that he lies; it is how he listens in order to be liked. His attentiveness is calculated. He mirrors Roman’s language, validates his anger, reframes it as something that needs managing, and positions himself as the one who can manage it. The dynamic has the precision of psychotherapy stripped of ethics. Dennis inserts himself into Roman’s life with the focus of a malign shrink, driven by personal need rather than care. The film edges carefully into questions of consent, particularly in a scene that tests bodily boundaries. Dennis accumulates small permissions, and by the time Roman understands how thoroughly he has been read, the boundaries are already blurred.
Sexuality and guilt are not side notes in Twinless. Rocky’s queerness, and Roman’s earlier rejection of it while his brother was still alive, sit beneath almost every choice Roman makes. Roman did not just lose his twin; he lost him having already pushed him away. There is an uneasy logic to how Roman relates to queerness now. He can tolerate it in Dennis in a way he could not tolerate it in his own brother. Part of this feels like an attempt at repair. And in the end, Dennis, unlike Rocky, stays. He needs Roman. That imbalance makes the closeness possible, even as it turns Dennis into a substitute.
The humour in Twinless is dry, social, often pitch-black, with no push towards uplift or catharsis. The bereavement group supplies one of the film’s sharpest lines when a speaker admits she was jealous that her twin got chlamydia on her own — after all, even illness is meant to be shared. Elsewhere, Roman beats up a group of teenagers who shout homophobic abuse, then remarks, without emphasis, “I thought Gen Z were supposed to be nice.”
The film’s focus shifts as it progresses, moving from Roman’s volatility to Dennis’s actions, and later to Marcy’s steadier point of view. Formally, the movie relies on controlled visual choices. Scenes are often held in fixed compositions, with slow zooms used to tighten focus rather than generate momentum. Characters frequently share the frame while remaining visually separated. Split screen divides reactions rather than action. In a mirror scene, Roman and Dennis appear in the same reflection but are divided by the frame. Jung Jae-il’s score appears and withdraws across the film. In a restaurant sequence, sound drops out completely. Roman sits alone with his thoughts, sealed from the outside world by silence.
That the film holds together is down to the writing. Sweeney’s dialogue is sharp and economical. As a writer-director-actor, he gives Dennis an interior logic that keeps him unsettling rather than schematic, and avoids the trap of a twist-driven film posing as a character study.
In the final scene, Roman unexpectedly invites Dennis to lunch. Roman knows exactly who Dennis is now, and Dennis knows that Roman knows. What remains are two men with different kinds of damage, sitting opposite one another with nowhere else to go. Dennis has been punished; Roman has already lost the person who mattered most. The film does not present this as healing. The moment is visually flat, almost mundane, but the tension sits underneath. Why are they meeting? Can anything honest be built once everything is exposed?
The ending leaves a final question hanging: once profound loneliness takes hold, does it lower standards simply because it becomes too hard to leave the chair opposite you empty for long?
Having premiered at Sundance, where it won the Audience Award, Twinless arrives in UK and Irish cinemas today, 6 February.
Elena Leo is the Culture & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.
