Twinless: a sweet, funny and uplifting portrayal of male friendship
Twinless is a classic comedy, in that no matter how much you laugh, you can never shake the feeling that the essence of the situation is tragic.
Roman is grieving the death of his identical twin brother Rocky in a traffic accident. He finds solace in a new friend, Dennis, whom he meets at a support group for people whose twin has died. Dennis provides the missing half Roman grieves for, and accompanies him as he shops for groceries, folds laundry and goes to hockey games.
Roman is stereotypically straight, and is also drawn to Dennis because, like Rocky, Dennis is gay. Dennis is talkative where Roman is taciturn, worldly where Roman is naive, and seems to have been able to move on while Roman remains grief-stricken. But Dennis harbours a shameful secret that threatens not only his friendship with Roman, but his own safety.
Twinless is likely to be the sleeper hit of the year, a great piece of entertainment that takes on life’s absurdities and its mundanities.
Not a single detail is out of place in its observational humour, from the grief support group leader who yearns to do stand-up, to the defensive office manager whose response to receiving a surprise birthday cake is to complain that her workmates have brought her personal life into the workplace.
It is the latest in a spate of films that includes Saltburn, Friendship and Lurker, which depict male friendship as at once intense and alienating. In each of these films, the protagonist’s attraction to his potential friend is motivated more by a need for self-validation than genuine interest in the other person. Friendship here becomes narcissistic, and is won through deception rather than a desire for genuine connection.
What gives these films their pathos is the context of the so-called epidemic of male loneliness. US data show that the number of men with six close friends or more has dropped from 40% in 1990 to 15% in 2021, while the number of men who report no close friends at all rose in the same period from 3% to 15%.
Such loneliness can be exploited by misogynists such as Andrew Tate, whose fantasies of domination present masculinity as a rigid hierarchy.
This finds its alternative in the so-called incel community, an identity whose novelty is its own definition as unwanted. Donald Trump won a majority of males in the 2024 US presidential election not through conventional campaign methods of slick messaging, but by showing them he had time for them, in events like his three-hour podcast “hang” with Joe Rogan.
Exploring masculinity in film
There is nothing new in saying that ideas of masculinity sit uneasily with those of friendship. Competition, self-reliance and – horror! – the implication of homosexuality load male relationships with the potential for anxiety. One way of overcoming these anxieties is found in the buddy movie, a genre in which the joyous energies of comedy-action provide a licence for regression to boyhood.
The buddy movie’s negative counterpart is the gothic figure of the double or doppelganger, whose terror is that the masculine virtues of individualism may be less stable than they seem. What these twin possibilities leave out is any positive model of what it looks like to be adult, male and friends.
This more recent spate of films combines comedy and threat, buddy and double. Rather than contrast joyous sociability with anxious individuality, it is sociability itself that is the source of anxiety. This speaks perhaps to a more insecure contemporary desire, one where self-affirmation is achieved by gaining a public. We are already long past the point where social media redefined the very meaning of the word “friend”.
Such distanced intimacy offers the classic comic potential of incongruity, between an image of suave assurance and a reality of bumbling pettiness. But it also foreshadows a tragic fate that our contemporary times might hold up as especially acute: that one might simply be a nobody.
Where Twinless differs from Saltburn, Friendship and Lurker is that its combination of comic absurdities and potential danger contains also a deep heart. In his friendship with Dennis, grief-stricken Roman depicts something that our culture usually finds very difficult to imagine: an image of straight masculinity that is actually lovely.
Roman may be monosyllabic, reactive, basic and naive – but he is also caring, uncritical, open and warm. Most exceptionally of all for a depiction of masculinity, he listens to others, and this listening helps him grow.
This recent cycle of black comedies dramatises how dangerous it can be when masculinity remains stuck in the view that social validation means winning a fight. Twinless touchingly, funnily and even beautifully at times demonstrates the transformative potential of what it might mean if masculinity were also to be seen as being a friend.
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Louis Bayman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.