James Sweeney's Twinless

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Each week, Drew creates a watchlist with film recommendations provided by you.

CELEBRATE last week’s winner: Kelly F., Cabin in the Woods.

The category was misleading movies. The winner has earned one ticket in the annual mystery prize lottery.

VOTE this week’s category: good movie, bad title.

That is, great movies with bad titles. Check out this week’s watchlist brought to you by the tnmn community and vote your favorite entries.

SUBMIT for next week’s category: so bad it’s good movies.

That is, a genuinely bad movie that you hold near and dear. Submit a movie to be featured in next week’s vote and increase your odds to win a mystery prize.

A spoiler-free description of the movie.

A young man grieving the loss of his twin brother joins a support group.

If you like these things, then you’ll like the film.

→ Project men. Allow me to introduce you to Dylan O-Brien, who manages to bring something new to the I-can-fix-him archetype.

→ Grief and hopefulness. The film is a quiet two-hander about characters confronting grief with a hopeful disposition.

→ Nifty editing work. Twinless is very well-edited and -choreographed, not just for show but in a way that provides deeper perspective on its characters. It was during a memorable composite shot (i.e. split-screen) that I became helplessly in love with this movie and the people in it.

→ When the title card comes late. Drew and I have a soft spot for movies that withhold their title cards until 20-40 minutes into the runtime.

What I liked about it.

Writer-director-actor James Sweeney’s Twinless is a beautifully written reflection on companionship, envy, loss, and forgiveness.

What makes this film special are the laid-bare and genuinely lovable performances by both Sweeney and his co-star, Dylan O-Brien. The chemistry between these two is infectious and palpable and likely to provide enough emotional kindling to warm the iciest hearts on the planet (I’m looking at you, Bill¹).

Also vital to the film’s brilliance are a few daring choices that Sweeney makes for each of his characters that this author won’t spoil. These deft writing choices and the timing with which they are deployed grant the film higher stakes than your typical grief-and-sadness fare and frankly broaden the thematic aperture to more interesting territory, like how to reconcile feelings of grief with those of hope and identity and forgiveness.

¹ You recall Bill, right? He’s the icy-hearted bastard that I referenced on April 1st, 2025, when we recommended the heartfelt geriatric revenge film entitled Thelma. Consider Bill the stand-in for anyone in your life that needs to have a good cry and a good laugh — both within a tight one-hundred-and-twenty minute span. For those of you who’ve been reading tnmn for a long while, there’s something here that is probably obvious to you and not to our newer members. That Bill is a projection of my father.

Daddy², I love you and I want you to know that it’s okay to let your guard down and say the words “I love you, and I’m proud of you, son.” That you can be smart and tough and brave without the hardened outer-layer you long ago designed to protect yourself from emotional hurt. That, in fact, the only way to truly be smart and tough and brave is to reveal yourself as susceptible to the same elements as the rest of us and to lie naked and feel your feelings whether it’s sunshine and rainbows or rain and sleet and thunder and lightning. This and only this is unguarded, real, bulletproof strength.

² My father is an avid reader of Tuesday Night Movie Night, and has recently complained to me that I haven’t written about him as much. He’s said things like, “You wrote about Mom the other day. Been a while since I’ve seen me in the newsletter.” But, when I did write about him, he would call me and say things like “What is wrong with you, Blake?” and “I shouldn’t have told my coworkers to sign up for your newsletter.” I decided to take a calculated risk today and do a daddy segment. Closing thought, a little bit related: it would be great to make some tnmn, daddy-themed merchandise. I can’t tell if I want to make this sort of merchandise because I think it would sell but I guess this topic is as good as any to bring up in therapy.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat.”

→ The supporting cast is full of real-life twins. James Sweeney’s concern was to accurately represent what it’s like to be a twin, an experience he proclaims is not a monolithic one: “We had twins read the script and we cast twins. All of the actors in the support group [in the film] are twins. I tried to have twin approval in each stage of the process.”

An essay unrelated to this week’s film.

LINES.

Virtually the most boring thing on planet Earth is the (mostly) human phenomenon known as the line. Waiting in lines is — and I mean this as much as anything I’ve ever written — the unbuttered white toast of the human experience.

The earliest this author remembers experiencing our species’ most viciously dull activity was at an amusement park called Busch Gardens. I haven’t been there in years but I’ll bet the turkey legs are still just as good and too pink to be considered safe to eat. It was a scaldingly hot summer — the kind that actually gets you paying attention to where the shade is even if you have a sun-friendly complexion — that I found myself waiting in a line at the Virginia theme park.

Back then, a kid could ride one of four big roller coasters at Busch Gardens or otherwise fuck off to the rocking Pirate Ship ride to get a stomachache. By definition, one of these coasters was the tallest or fastest or newest and therefore the line where park patrons spent the most meaningful hours of their day.

It bears mentioning that the lines of yore weren’t rife with amenities and audio-visual entertainment as they are now at some parks — they were very boring and (usually) hot. Often offsetting the palpable misery of the most popular ride’s queue was live entertainment of a particularly amateurish sort. Entertainers with those theme park microphones strapped to their heads that speak with an inhuman enthusiasm that obviously isn’t a naturally occurring trait but rather a taught skill.

On the day I was standing in line, the entertainment prescribed included five youthful singers presumably meant to evoke the boy bands of the time (i.e. Backstreet Boys Walmart celebrities). They sang songs, I sweat through whatever I was wearing but it’s all not very important other than to tell you that the line sucked and it was the beginning of this author’s complicated relationship with lines.

Of course I don’t like standing in lines — no one does. But the worst part for me as a chronic over-thinker is that I had to both experience the dullness of the line and venture down some sort of mind-numbing, obvious logic continuum about how society needs lines. That my boredom is irrelevant because lines are necessary and important and useful. Eventually accompanying that never-ending feeling we tend to get when we wait in line, for me, was also the concept that lines themselves will never cease to exist. And I think I was correct.

AN ARGUMENT IN FAVOR OF LINES. Imagine a world full of grown-ups that never learned how to wait in line. The impatience and indignation and utter stupidity would be unbearable and we’d be far closer to Idiocracy than we already are.

ANOTHER ARGUMENT IN FAVOR OF LINES. Rollercoaster Tycoon. Imagine the classic PC amusement park simulator without the notion of lines. Part of the joke of building those death-machine rollercoasters with minutes-long climbs and tracks that disappeared without warning was the crowds of customers waiting for their inevitable, untimely deaths (this is how we all played the game, right?). The point is that the conceit of the game entirely fails without lines and wait time management. Operating a simulated amusement park would be so simple that the game itself would be pointless and without the sort of intrinsic mental reward that makes video games playable.

Even if we assume that without lines, little human beings still learn patience and order and grow up to be un-entitled, productive members of society — consider the alternatives to lines (in the utilitarian sense). What are the other options in managing crowds? I’m hyperbolic by nature but my best guess: the universe temporarily shifts into something resembling Mad Max every time you seek admission into a concert or board an airplane or your niece’s high school graduation. That’s bad and I’m not open to arguments that humanity would find another way. Lines are the best and most resource-efficient way to tame the chaos naturally occurring when a whole lot of people want the same thing at the same time.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE LINE. The line, or queue (as it’s often referred to in Europe), is a relatively recent, man-made invention. According to a now-defunct publication (Racked): “The first historical description of the line only appeared in 1837, in Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution. Describing a postwar scarcity of bread, he wrote: ‘If we look now at Paris, one thing is too evident: that the Bakers’ shops have got their Queues, or Tails; their long strings of purchasers, arranged in tail, so that the first come be the first served.’ According to Carlyle, lining up was a uniquely French eccentricity.”

Before lines were likely what you see in today’s street markets or cultures that haven’t yet embraced the concept — a bulbous, many-limbed organism of arms and legs moving any which way, jockeying to get the attention of whomever is deciding who gets what and when they get it. A system of waiting that only serves the loudest and most abrasive people. The ones willing to step on heads to get where they want to go.

The lesson here is that lines aren’t merely the annoying part. Their existence has brought order and patience to an inherently impatient species.

So what if they're boring? The optimistic fellow in me might say that to be miserable in a line is a privilege. Something to be appreciated. At the end of the line is usually an activity one is excited to partake in. A fun activity that is probably economically prohibitive for other members of the general public for a multitude of unlucky reasons (lack of generational wealth, inaccessibility of quality education, or in some spheres of political discourse — “laziness”). What right do we have to hate lines if they almost always lead to things that we want to do?

Well, there is another part of me, one far less optimistic and far less pleasant to be around (I’d think) and somehow still darned proud to be here. This part of me is compelled to step in like a pessimistic (but equally handsome 😉) Captain America and say something charming like: “Sometimes people wait in lines for bad things. Things they don’t want to do”.

AN OBSERVATION. In an act of incalculable perversion, lines can be the thing we do before the most stupefyingly exciting, drool-inducing events in our mostly insignificant lives and also lines can be the very last thing we do.

FACTS. Assuming economic viability, quite a few of your fun memories are probably preceded by a very boring and long line. According to this study I just made up that was never conducted but don’t trust everything you read on the Internet, the top five very fun things people wait in line for are: (1) Taylor Swift concerts, (2) Hershey Park’s chocolate factory tour, (3) climbing the Eiffel Tower, (4) ski lifts, and (5) German nightclubs (i.e. orgies with mostly attractive people).

And also, history has proven over and over lines a swiss army knife for toxic bureaucracy and evildoers. Guess what slaves and Native Americans and my Jewish ancestors and other dead people often have in common? Before their lives were taken from them, whether through forced servitude or mass execution — they were told to wait in line by some monumental asshole on a power trip. You know what perfectly innocent queer kids do before they end up in conversion camps? They wait in line to board a bus. And also every single one of us has to wait in line at the DMV.

If you are wondering whether or not this (Jewish) author is allowed to equate the waiting in line during the Holocaust and other atrocities to being a little sad at the DMV — I’m not sure. Put aside the asinine risk I took for the sake of an unnecessarily dark joke.

Take away from the graspable premise that lines can also be bad news, and they very often are. Humanity should be wary of lines in the same way that our evolutionary biology makes us wary of eating things that smell like sulfur because they may be poisonous.

Probably the strangest part of this demented truth is the following: whether the thing at the end of the line is good or bad for an individual and our society is largely subject to interpretation by people. And people exist across a vast spectrum of both intellect and power.

A very harmless example: Drew and I wouldn’t wait in line for the midnight premiere of The Avengers 34: The Rise of Blagamortheus (working title). Because we think the thing waiting for us at the end of the line is bad.

A very harmful example: Not okay at all is the fact that there are (still) real life, active Nazi’s that would reflect on the length of lines leading into the gas chambers and wish there were more people waiting in them.

Another very harmful example: Today, in my country, there are people waiting in (you guessed it) lines to join an organization called ICE. I have to presume (perhaps so as to not lose faith in humanity wholesale) that these future ICE agents think they are waiting in line to do something good for their country (defend, protect, keep safe, etc.), but the fact is there’s plenty of horrifying evidence in the contrary.

All of this begs the question humanity ought to always be asking itself: What do we do when two people look at a line and see completely different things? When one person sees a bad Marvel movie and the other the cinematic event of a lifetime? Or, however inexplicable, when one sees an inhumane atrocity and the other a solution to all or most of their problems?

One argument for how to deal with such a problem is to put them in the line and let them see for themselves. The obvious truth is that if we spend our lives trying to put other people in lines to teach them a lesson, we’re no better than the DMV. And that this approach is antithetical to personal fulfillment and a clear pathway to anarchy and chaos and division.

The other argument: talk to them about the line. Perhaps if you try to understand where they are coming from, you will either a) be able to convince them otherwise or b) learn that you are the one who needs to see things differently.

It’s all very complex and here only a few things are certain. Humanity is probably destined to wrestle with this question for a very long time. And that the day we stop asking ourselves the question is the day we lose everything.

My grandfather was a hobbyist woodworker and also a big fan of the principle that there’s more than one way to do things. Perhaps this rule applies here. That for some people with whom you disagree, a reasonable discussion will suffice to help them see your perspective (or vice versa). And for others, the situation has to affect them personally for them to see a different perspective.

When I reached the end of the line at Busch Gardens all those years ago, my heart was pounding. I was petrified of a relatively tame roller coaster called The Big Bad Wolf. I cried like a baby until my mom pulled me out of line. So many of the kids in line with me were thrilled to be able to move another place forward in line, that much closer to getting what they wanted.

I looked around on the benches near the ride exit with my mom and saw several more tearful kids around my age, relieved not to reach the end of the line. In the background, screams of sheer joy and involuntary excitement coming from those who made it onto The Big Bad Wolf.

My mother, patience incarnate, spent years encouraging me to overcome my fear and ride The Big Bad Wolf. Perhaps most useful was the time she spent trying to understand why I was afraid, instead of merely pushing me onto the ride. The stakes were low, she told me: “If you don’t like it, you’ll never go again. The important part is to see what it’s like, so you can decide for yourself.”

She finally convinced me to try it when she looked at me and said, “I’ll go with you.” The gravity of this promise at my age was of radical proportions because I knew very well that my mother was deathly afraid of rollercoasters. We boarded the ride and she held my hand from start to finish.

We exited the ride and snaked our way back to the black pavement of the park’s primary traversal area and I shot my mom a toothy grin: “Can we go again?!” Turns out, I loved rollercoasters.

She smiled at me and said: “You can go again with your brothers. I hate rollercoasters.”

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