James Sweeney’s Twinless (2025) is a psychological black comedy that slices through the conventions of grief narratives with wit, audacity, and emotional precision.
Written, directed, and starring Sweeney himself, the film premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. At its core, the film is a twisted, tender exploration of identity, loss, and the fragile boundaries between connection and deception.
The story unfolds in Portland, Oregon, where Dennis (played by Sweeney), a young gay man, meets Rocky (Dylan O’Brien) at a diner. Their brief romantic encounter ends in tragedy when Rocky is killed in a car accident. Dennis, consumed by grief and obsession, infiltrates a support group for twinless twins—posing as someone who lost a twin—to get close to Rocky’s surviving brother, Roman (also played by O’Brien). What follows is a darkly comic descent into emotional manipulation, longing, and the search for belonging. Roman and Dennis form a bond that teeters between healing and unhealthy codependency, complicated further by Marcie (Aisling Franciosi), a colleague who begins to unravel Dennis’s fabricated backstory. The film’s climax—an unsettling hotel room confession and violent fallout—leaves both men isolated, yet strangely tethered by shared grief and fractured intimacy.
Inspiration
Sweeney’s inspiration for Twinless emerged from a fascination with twin bereavement support groups—a concept he found both peculiar and profound. “It’s such a splitting of oneself,” he explained in interviews, noting that while he isn’t a twin, the emotional terrain of twin loss struck him as symbolically rich and narratively underexplored.
The film’s title evokes not just the absence of a sibling, but a rupture in identity, a severing of mirrored selfhood. Sweeney’s writing process involved extensive research and structural experimentation, including a pivotal point-of-view shift that deepens the psychological complexity of the narrative. He also drew inspiration from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, particularly the witches’ incantation “Double, double toil and trouble,” which he saw as emblematic of the chaos and duality at the heart of his story.
Casting Dylan O’Brien was a deliberate and inspired choice. Sweeney first considered O’Brien after seeing his viral reenactment of a scene from The Social Network, and later admired his performance in the YouTube series Weird City.
In Twinless, O’Brien delivers a career-defining dual performance as Roman and Rocky, embodying two distinct personalities with emotional nuance and physical precision. His portrayal of Roman—a man grappling with the loss of his twin and the intrusion of a deceptive friend—is especially poignant, capturing the vulnerability and rage that accompany grief. O’Brien also earned his first executive producer credit for the film, underscoring his deep investment in the project.
Twinless is significant not only for its thematic ambition but for its tonal daring. It refuses to sentimentalise grief, instead presenting it as a messy, sometimes grotesque process of self-reinvention. The film interrogates the ethics of empathy, the limits of forgiveness, and the seductive power of shared pain.
Sweeney has described storytelling as “humanity’s coping mechanism for the mysteries and challenges of life,” and Twinless embodies that ethos with sharp dialogue, surreal twists, and moments of unexpected tenderness.
“I try to write with authenticity in all facets of a filming. Like, even though it’s not even in the movie — it was in the movie, we just cut the scenes —I needed to know what the characters’ jobs were. To me, it all helps build. I like laying the bricks because it just helps me understand who these characters are. I guess in terms of twin research, I have always been interested in twins. I remember reading psychology studies about twins, because they’re sort of like the perfect specimen, in high school, and when I was researching for this script about twin bereavement and twin psychology, I was reading books, and I was talking to friends. Also, we cast all twin actors in the support group, including the background talent, so I felt like I had insight along the way, and I kind of just listened to and also imagined what was appropriate and organically made sense for these characters. “
In a cinematic landscape often dominated by formulaic grief dramas, Twinless stands out as a bold, genre-defying work that blends psychological insight with dark humour. It is a film about the lies we tell to feel less alone, the truths that shatter us, and the strange, stubborn ways we seek connection. For Sweeney, it is a lasting artistic legacy—a sly dose of empathy wrapped in chaos, comedy, and radical vulnerability.
Distributed by Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions in the United States, and Sony Pictures Releasing International abroad, Twinless became available for streaming and theatrical release from September 5, 2025. You can stream Twinless (2025) on Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play Movies, YouTube, and Fandango At Home.
Get to Know James Sweeney
