This Indian series is being sold as a story about a gay man falling for his straight best friend but honestly, at its heart, it's really about friendship and what friendship can look like when it gets complicated and messy and emotionally loaded. It's available on the YouTube channel of Last Leaf Pictures, seven episodes of about 30 minutes each. I had mixed feelings throughout and a big part of that comes down to how I felt about one of the lead characters, but more on that in a bit. Anshul and Kavith are the two men at the centre of everything. They first meet on a train heading to Delhi, both of them not really ready to go back to their hometowns. They get off midway, turn around and head back to Mumbai to give themselves one more shot at the life they want there. Anshul is an aspiring actor with a young son back in Delhi living with his grandmother. Kavith is gay, freshly out of yet another relationship, his 17th by his own count over the years. The two strike up this unusu...
The film brings together Roman and Dennis, two young strangers who cross paths at a support group for people who've lost a twin. That kind of grief is so specific and so strange that really only someone who's been through it could even begin to understand it. Roman is this quiet, physically imposing guy whose sudden bursts of rage are all the more unsettling because of how still he usually is. Dennis is skinny, openly gay, and has this sharp self deprecating humour that he uses like a shield. They're completely different people but tragedy pulls them together and that bond actually holds even after Dennis tells Roman he's gay, partly because Roman's own brother who passed away was gay too. These two just quietly fill the gap that losing a sibling leaves behind. Then about 20 minutes in the film rewinds and shows us something that changes everything. Turns out Dennis had actually met Rocky, Roman's twin, had a one night stand with him and became completely obsessed. When he showed up one day to surprise him, that was the day Rocky died in a car accident. So Dennis basically invented a dead twin brother just to get close to Roman through the support group. What he actually wants from all this isn't entirely clear even to him. Things shift again when Dennis introduces Roman to a colleague of his and the two of them fall hard for each other. She starts finding it strange that she's never once heard about Dennis's supposed dead brother. Eventually Dennis has to tell Roman the truth and Roman, understandably, beats him up for it. The ending though, which comes a little later in time, has Roman reaching out to Dennis just to check in, leaving the door open for something real between them.
Twinless is genuinely hard to put into one box. Grief sits right at the middle of it and there's this one scene where Roman asks Dennis to pretend to be his dead brother just so he can talk to him, and it absolutely breaks your heart. You get a real sense of how these brothers slowly drifted apart before the death and how differently they each dealt with everything. Dennis on the other hand, who also happens to have directed the film, is this fascinating mix of sympathetic and quietly unsettling. He carries guilt because some part of him feels responsible for Rocky's death. He's drawn to Roman partly because of that guilt and partly because he nearly fell for Rocky himself. The actor plays it in a way where you can't fully root for him or fully write him off, and that balance is really hard to pull off. The story could easily have felt like a disaster on paper, a gay man inserting himself into the life of a grieving straight guy under false pretences, but the screenplay is tight enough and the execution careful enough that it just works. The film also shifts perspective between the two characters at different points which keeps you on your toes. And Dylan O'Brien is genuinely outstanding here, playing two completely different people at opposite ends of everything, one straight and closed off, the other commanding and a little unpredictable, and he's completely convincing as both.
It's funny, it's sad, it's original and it never forgets the very real human loneliness sitting underneath all of it. That last scene ties everything together in the most quietly beautiful way. (8/10)
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