Before the start of Twinless, a classic Sundance curio with very little known about what it was or where it came from, the writer, director and star James Sweeney was unusually withholding. The creator of 2019’s micro-budget comedy Straight Up wanted us to experience it without a detailed introduction, avoiding an earnest ramble about his intentions or hopes. It was surprisingly self-effacing but it also revealed a deeper motive: he didn’t want us to know that what we were about to see was almost certainly not what anyone was expecting.
One of the joys of a world-first festival premiere is that you may well be the only audience to ever see a certain film almost entirely blind and given the twisty, often jaw-droppingly unexpected nature of Twinless, it’ll be a hard one to keep fully under wraps until release. It’s doubly hard given how hugely impressive the film is as well, something you desperately want to talk about even though you know you probably shouldn’t. It’s therefore rather impossible to write about it without the slightest of spoilers but I’ll try to keep them to a bare minimum.
