Twinless finds a career-best Dylan O'Brien inside James Sweeney's tonal high-wire act

Sweeney's sophomore feature swings from dark comedy to grief to something closer to thriller without ever losing its footing, anchored by a Dylan O'Brien performance that ranks among the year's best.

By MIGUEL MATEO | SEPTEMBER 5, 2025

James Sweeney's Twinless earns its title twice over. It is a film about a man missing his twin, and it is also a film that refuses to settle into a single genre and stay there, the way a twin refuses to be reduced to one half of a whole. Sweeney, directing only his second feature, keeps swapping registers scene to scene, black comedy sliding into grief, meet-cute rhythms tipping into something closer to psychological thriller, tenderness curdling into the year's most disquieting turn. What could easily read as tonal whiplash instead plays as authorial control. Sweeney knows exactly which mood a moment needs, and he trusts the audience to keep pace without a hand on the small of their back.

The film's structural gamble does a lot of that work. Twinless opens inside Roman's account of meeting Dennis at a support group for people who have lost a twin, then rewinds and retells the same stretch of time from Dennis's side. It could easily have felt like a screenwriting trick. Instead it functions as the film's argument made visible. Grief, the movie suggests, is never a shared story, only two people's separate versions of the same silence. When the film finally pulls back the curtain on what Dennis has been withholding, the tonal rug pull isn't a twist for its own sake. It's the whole movie's thesis landing at once.

Dylan O'Brien carries the emotional weight of that structure, and he is extraordinary doing it. Playing both Roman and, in flashback, his dead twin Rocky, O'Brien never leans on the gimmick of a dual role to do the acting for him. His Roman is a man performing wellness at people who can see straight through it, flinching every time someone treats him as a whole person rather than half of one. It's a performance built on small collapses rather than big ones, and it accumulates until a late scene simply undoes him, and the audience along with him. This is a career high point for O'Brien, and one of the best performances any actor has given this year.

What keeps Twinless from curdling into misery, or from playing its comedy as a shield, is how honestly it treats codependency and yearning as the same impulse wearing different faces. Sweeney, who also plays Dennis, understands that people don't grieve cleanly, that they attach to the wrong person for the right reasons, and that a joke can sit an inch from a wound without cheapening either. Most dramas flatten that mess into something more legible. Twinless lets it stay messy, and trusts that the mess is the truth.

Rating: ★★★★ out of ★★★★★