This weekend saw the release of The Identical, a story of twins (a thinly-disguised Elvis Presley and his brother who, in real life, died at birth) raised by different families and set on different paths. Blake Rayne plays both rock and roll star Drexel Hemsley and his unknown twin Ryan Wade, whose plan to follow in his adopted father’s footsteps as a preacher are sidetracked by his lucrative new career as–what else?–a Drexel Hemsley impersonator. Attention has mostly focused on The Identical‘s bizarre high-concept premise and its Christian message, but it’s only the latest film to use twins as a symbol of the divided self or the road not taken (or simply indulge in some playful movie magic, allowing a single actor to play two characters).
In that spirit, The Solute recommends three films about or featuring twins:
Guy: The marketing for the 1952 exploitation feature Chained for Life asks lurid questions like “Joined together, how can they make love to separate husbands?” Beneath the sensationalism, however, it’s a mostly level-headed look at the problems faced by real-life conjoined twins Violet and Daisy Hilton, who (as “Vivian and Dorothy Hamilton”) stand trial for the murder of Dorothy’s faithless husband. Can the court mete out justice to one sister without unfairly punishing the other? That question (as well as those posed on the film’s poster) is left unanswered, but viewers looking for titillation will be left with a sympathetic and deeply sad glimpse into the lives of the two sisters who spent most of their lives in show business but whose only other film credit was for appearing in Tod Browning’s Freaks.
Kevin: I feel like Spike Jonze’s Adaptation is the quintessential twin movie. Nicolas Cage is brilliant as both Charlie and the fictional Donald Kaufman, illuminating their differences while also laying the foundation for their third act discovery of brotherly love. Donald works as a great foil for Charlie by being a direct projection of his frustration and anxiety, succeeding where Charlie struggles. It’s a great central conflict that a cereberal film like this needs, and twins provide the perfect metaphor to realize it as Donald is literally Charlie’s untapped recognition.
Julius: My favorite twins movie is one that’s a spoilery twin reveal. I Know Who Killed Me is possibly the more ludicrous, lurid, and hilarious twin movie I think that has come down the pipe since Sisters. Rooted in the same idea as The Identical, what happens when two identical twin sisters are separated at birth, with one raised by her biological crackhead mother and the other by an upper-middle class family? Well, if you guessed they’d both be kidnapped, tortured and disfigured, you guessed right? Lindsay Lohan turns in a beautiful performance as both a low-rent stripper and an effete piano student. There are plot twists-a-plenty, but I Know Who Killed Me is a laugh riot, and I don’t want to spoil them all.