hedges and fences
by Douglas Messerli
James Sweeney (screenwriter and director) Twinless / 2025
James Sweeney’s Twinless is a rather
wonderful movie with a great many structural hurdles to metaphorically leap
over before it draws to its sweet conclusion. For one, Sweeney’s film is a
bifurcated genre piece: a gay rom-com that might just as accurately be
described as a dark heterosexual drama about loss and death. Its charming
central figure Dennis (played by the writer and director), who nearly everyone
is drawn to, is also a liar who manipulates all those around him—a role often
attributed to film directors and screenplay scripters.
Moreover,
the film’s viewers know more about the story early in the film than do most of
its characters, which, depending upon your viewpoint, either contributes to the
tensions that build up in this film as Dennis’ lies keep accruing, or deflates
the dramatic impact of the work by itself providing a spoiler to its own plot.
Here,
perhaps is where I too need to provide a warning, since I am about to tell you
almost everything that keeps one’s attention in watching the film in process: Dennis,
who pretends to be a twin, is in reality an only son, who insinuates himself
into a small group of grieving twins who have lost their other halves, and there
strikes up a relationship with one handsome if not so bright ex-twin, Roman (Dylan
O’Brien) with whose gay brother Rocky, Dennis has had a memorable one-night
stand and was accidentally the cause of his death. (No, this is not an AIDS
film, Dennis simply called out to his bed-mate on the street, causing Rocky to blindly
walk in his direction when he was hit by a car—yet another possible reference
to the awful role a film director plays in his machinations of figures cast
upon a screen representing real human beings.)
In Dennis’ hook-up with the straight, rather
violent jock, Sweeney takes his film into yet another genre, lesser known to a
general audience, that of the gay boy bromance with a straight boy who may or
may not take it to the limit by sexually sharing his bed, but in this case openly
shares nearly everything in his somewhat empty head.
In short,
Sweeney almost sets up a series of metaphorical caveletti and jumping blocks
before his film even gets fully underway, which, in turn, allows us to delight
in watching how he jockeys his way over these impediments in most cases with
ease, while almost tripping up his work in a few instances.
Like most writers and directors, Sweeney plays
his character also as a seemingly self-assured liar who at heart is perhaps the
neediest figure in his dramedy cum bromance, which accounts for both his
charm and the near disgust we feel for him at other moments. If he has never
had a twin, he has clearly always wanted one, or at least a brother, or, since
now it’s too late for either of those, a loyal lover. He appears to have found
that individual in Rocky, a sophisticated and witty seducer, who takes him to
bed and makes him feel for once that he has discovered what he’s been looking
for, with the jackpot of him being an actual twin.
Yet Rocky,
it turns out, has his own dark shadows. Although seemingly a loving,
self-assured man, he is actually a one-night-stand boy who promises deep love,
but, constantly on the prowl, doesn’t come back for more. It is for that reason
Dennis has gone in search of him, calls out to him on the street, and cannot resist
seeking out his now twinless brother.
If Rocky is
always “roamin,” however, his twin Roman, when it comes to deep thinking, is a
kind of “rock” (sorry for the play on names, but I couldn’t resist that in a
film which constantly calls up the simultaneous synonymity and opposition of
one thing and another). For the most part, Roman is a dark bulb whose malapropisms
make up some of the film’s most clever moments. As Roman himself puts it, he’s
not “the brightest tool in the shed.”
Yet there
is a reason why Rocky has described him to Dennis as being “the good twin.”
What he lacks in quick thinking, Roman makes up for in deep feeling. Unlike his
former twin, Roman is loyal to his new friend and, soon after, the girl Marcie
(Aisling Franciosi) to whom Dennis introduces him, transforming the needy
friend into a third wheel on the couple’s way to the altar. Marcie is as simplistically
an all-American girl—kitschy frills, flowers, and girl’s nights out—as Roman is
an all-American boy—sandwich loving, sports-minded, and prone to violence. They
have been created to orbit one another.
Yet both
also display, in their abilities to help Dennis as character (and Sweeney as
director) maneuver his way through the hurdles he has set up for himself. Just
to please Roman, Dennis has agreed to join his new friend at a hockey match in
Seattle. And there in a motel room the two not only join one another in a
(sexless) bed, but in hugs, as Roman attempts to get to the heart of his
violent urges. Los Angeles Times critic Carlos Aguilar quite nicely
expresses what happens that special night:
“And then, in the quiet intimacy of a hotel room
during a trip to Seattle to catch a hockey game, Roman agrees to pretend that
Dennis is Rocky to work through unresolved feelings about his gone-too-soon
brother.
Drifting
between boiling anger and crushing regret, O’Brien’s delivery of a monologue to
the ghost of Rocky astounds for its insides-bearing rawness. Roman struggles to
get out his sentences amid painful cries of despair.”
What doesn’t
get said—and in a sense is imperceivable by the heteronormative survivor—is
that the very reasons Roman adores Marcie and his American way of life is what
has driven his gay brother to Japan and other worlds in which he could more
openly live out his differences. And without sounding like a schlock shrink, I
would argue that it is precisely why Roman is so loyal and geographically
sedentary and Rocky is always seeking something new, including nightly
bedmates.
So what
is a confused kid like Dennis supposed to do, drawn to the sexual thrill of a
Rocky while desiring the steadfastness of a Roman? Obviously, it’s an
unresolvable conundrum. And leave it to the flighty-minded Marcie to sleuth out
the fact that Dennis is not only a gay boy without a twin but using her
boyfriend to weave him into his fantasy of desires. One night in the firm in
which they are both employed, she calls him into the boardroom to read him the “riot
act”: either she reveals the truth to Roman or Dennis must immediately confess
to him just how he has used her lover.
In yet
another hotel room, Dennis meets up with Roman, offering to give him a foot
massage, which after a few pleasurable moans quickly turns into a slightly
kinky toe-sucking session that momentarily angers Roman just enough to provoke
Dennis to tell the truth: not only did he have sex with Rocky but unintentionally
caused his death. This time the violence of American society descends through Roman’s
fists upon the body of the now disgraced faggot. "La commedia è finita."
Sweeney’s
movie instead turns into a kind of potential fairy tale, wherein after several
weeks, Roman discovers that on certain nights when Marcie is out with her
female friends, he misses the close friendship of Dennis, who in so many
respects has actually replaced Rocky as a twin. The two join up in their former
favorite deli, Dennis now patched up after the pummeling. It is not an easy reconciliation
for either of them, and for a moment, we even doubt Sweeney’s abilities to leap
this final hedge. But both realize that despite their failures as human beings,
Dennis’ lies and Roman’s gullibility, that they both are needy men who had
found a friend, if nothing else, in one another.
Throughout the film, their “twinness” has been belied by their almost
unison responses to questions from deli clerks and waiters, in which they answer
in opposition. This time, as the waiter asks if he should clear away Dennis’
uneaten sandwich, they speak the same words, requesting that it be boxed up to
go. As Aguilar puts it, “We are no longer watching them from afar [or, I might
add, as we might through the lens of the director’s camera]. The walls have come
down. They speak in unison.”
My
husband Howard joked, we can only look forward now to Twinless Two. Will
Roman try out male-on-male sex just as Dennis has opened himself up to the hockey
matches in the first film? Will the company receptionist Marcie meet up, either
on line or in person, with the woman of her dreams? Might we discover that the
company boss Sage (Susan Park), who never whispers a word about her personal
life, is secretly podcasting about her sexual S&M experiences?
Given how
skillfully Sweeney has rounded the track in this, his second feature film, we can
only patiently await more gut-punching delights.
Los Angeles, September 22, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(September 2025).
