Twinless (2025)
★★★★½

Twinless begins quietly, almost shyly, like it’s afraid to press too hard on the bruise it’s about to expose. Roman, played with raw restraint by Dylan O’Brien, is reeling after the sudden death of his identical twin, Rocky. He moves through the world like someone orbiting his own life. There’s a distance in his eyes, a dullness in his movements, as if he’s trying to relearn how to exist when the person who shared his face — his mirror-self — is gone.

In a last-ditch attempt to feel anything other than hollow, Roman joins a support group for “twinless twins,” a room full of folding chairs, grief-adjacent snacks, and people trying to articulate a loss most others will never understand. It’s in this room that he meets Dennis (James Sweeney), who claims he also recently lost his twin. Dennis is awkward, overly earnest, and slightly intrusive in a way that manages to be both comforting and unsettling. He pushes into Roman’s orbit with a persistence that shouldn’t work but somehow does. Their friendship forms quickly, almost too quickly, but grief accelerates connection. It makes strangers feel like lifelines.

What follows is a bond that feels warm and uneasy in equal measure. Roman finally starts to speak, to breathe, to unclench. But the film doesn’t keep that comfort intact for long. The version of himself that Dennis presents begins to crack. Then splinter. Then collapse entirely.

Spoilers ahead — but this is where the film’s emotional spine lives.
Dennis never had a twin. Not even close. Instead, he once shared a fleeting, intimate moment with Rocky before the accident — a one-night encounter that he couldn’t shake. On the night Rocky died, Dennis confronted him in the street, hoping for something more. That confrontation distracted Rocky long enough to step into traffic.

It is a brutal reveal, not for its shock value, but for the emotional reorganisation it demands. Suddenly every shared laugh, every late-night conversation, every moment of tenderness between Roman and Dennis becomes strung with tension. What felt like kinship is now tangled with guilt, longing, obsession and the unbearable weight of what Dennis knows but can’t take back.

Dylan O’Brien is magnificent. Truly. He delivers a dual performance that lets you feel the distance between Roman and Rocky instantly. Rocky is magnetic, alive, a burst of colour in every memory. Roman is greyed out, cautious, held together by threads. O’Brien plays Roman with such quiet devastation that even his smallest gestures feel heavy.

James Sweeney is excellent across the board. As Dennis, he walks the line between sympathetic and deeply flawed without ever tipping into caricature. He captures the lonely yearning of someone who desperately wants connection but doesn’t know how to pursue it without breaking things. As writer-director, Sweeney shapes the film with a soft but sure touch. The pacing leans into discomfort, letting scenes sit long enough for the truth beneath them to rise.

And then there’s Lauren Graham, luminous but underused as Roman’s mother. She has only a handful of scenes, yet she carries a coldness that’s deeply affecting — a brittle uncertainty in how to parent the son she has left. It plays like a woman unsure what to do now that she’s left with the “less liked” twin. Harsh, but unmistakably there. Her clipped sentences and evasive glances add a secondary layer of loneliness to Roman’s grief, one he never puts words to because he doesn’t have the energy.

What makes Twinless linger is the tone: a mix of humour, ache and emotional fog that feels painfully true. The support group scenes are some of the best — strange, funny, sincere, full of people trying and failing and trying again. The hints of the uncanny never turn the film into a ghost story; they work more like emotional echoes, visualising the way grief keeps speaking even when the person is gone.

By the final diner scene, where Roman and Dennis face each other once more, the film resists tidy reconciliation. There are no apologies neat enough to fix what’s broken. No breakthrough that makes everything okay. Just two damaged people sitting across a cheap laminate table, acknowledging what happened, and deciding — slowly, maybe subconsciously — that there might still be space for something, even if it’s fragile.

Twinless is tender, unsettling and full of small emotional details that cling to you long after the credits roll. Four and a half stars. Loved this movie. It’s one that stays with you in the quiet moments, long after you think you’ve shaken it off.

—

If you liked this…

Here are three recommendations that match the mood, themes and emotional texture of Twinless. They carry the same blend of grief, intimacy, complicated connection and that unsettling-but-tender human messiness that makes the film work so well.

Aftersun (2022)

A quiet emotional gut-punch about memory, grief and the versions of people we keep long after they’re gone. Like Twinless, it’s intimate, restrained and hits harder the longer you sit with it. That same ache of trying to understand someone you’ve already lost.

Sorry for Your Loss (2018)

Probably the closest tonal match. It follows a young woman trying to rebuild her life after her husband’s sudden death, and it treats grief with the same messy, honest, sometimes uncomfortable tenderness Twinless leans into. The support-group energy, family tension and emotional backslides all align.

The Rabbit Hutch — Tess Gunty

Not about twins, but perfect if you want the same eerie, tender human messiness. It explores grief, identity and obsession through characters who keep colliding in strange, fragile ways. It has that same emotional hum beneath the surface that Twinless carries so well.