Dylan O'Brien Double Feature (Including One with Double Dylans)

Twinless, directed by and starring James Sweeney is very funny and also creepy and strange and a bit troubling. I liked it. 

Dylan O’Brien gives a stellar performance. 

The more I think about it the smarter I think this screenplay is. In many ways it’s structured like other romantic comedies, but I think Sweeney just goes about all of this in a really, really smart way. It’s a very clever bit of writing. Like, compared to other recent gay romantic comedies, this is head and shoulders above the desperately generic Things like This, which even Joey Pollari couldn’t save. 

Another thing to say about Twinless, and one of the reasons I liked it so much, is that it is really unapologetically gay. It has a sensibility to it that is gay in its very construction and point of view rather than being simply a story about a gay man. I appreciated this a great deal. It feels very rare right now.

I really really wish this Esteban Arango's Ponyboi were better, but it’s mired in a kind of overly sentimental Sundance vibe that takes itself way too seriously and insistently stresses its own self importance. 

This movie is also way too slow, with long sections of neon-lit slow-motion fantasies that don’t work and undermine the gritty realism for which the screenplay is actually aiming. The movie can't decide on its own tone, really, and so we get dreamy, colorful, neon fantasy (like the poster) and then we contrast that with serious crime film.

Dylan O’Brien is predictably wonderful in this—he understands what he’s doing perfectly, giving us a villain who’s also a sort of comic buffoon who we want to care about even though he’s an unredeemable idiot asshole. 

I loved Indya Moore, too. She shines in her one scene, a sequence that actually makes very little sense in the film’s narrative structure but which works very well because of Moore’s assured and confident performance.