This week, I saw two indie films that disappeared from theaters before anyone noticed. Both are about men who begin a friendship built on lies, both are the sorts of unsettling and darkly funny movies you watch through your fingers, and both are worth checking out when they hit streaming any day now.
The first is called Lurker, written and directed by Alex Russell, a devious little psychological portrait of a celebrity and an acolyte. The celebrity is Oliver (Archie Madekewe), an electro-R&B musician on the rise. He has a chance encounter with a guy named Matty (Théodore Pellerin), who attracts Oliver because he’s so aloof. He doesn’t treat him like a celebrity. But it turns out Matty really cares about Oliver, and he so effortlessly joins the entourage that everyone’s hackles go up.
Matty knows how precarious his position is, because Oliver’s coterie has a revolving door. Rivalries develop, but they’re mostly unspoken and have a homoerotic charge. The irony is that the guy they’re all squabbling over isn’t even that famous, but there’s a certain adulation in being noticed by someone who has been anointed by his Instagram followers.
That makes Lurker distinctly contemporary, when parasocial relationships blur the line between fans and voyeurs. The movie hits a certain level of tension early on and then maintains it, so that it never really peaks, but its low hum of menace reflects the unease of the characters.
The better of these films is Twinless, about two guys who meet in a support group for people whose twin siblings have died. One is Roman (Dylan O’Brien). The other is Dennis (James Sweeney, who also wrote and directed). Roman is a caricature of heterosexual meatheads, slightly dim and prone to violent outbursts. Dennis is gay, withdrawn, too smart for his own good. They have nothing in common except their shared loss, and they grow so close that they’re doing everything together but have sex.
Their friendship, as you’ve no doubt gathered, is predicated on a lie. I won’t spoil how the first half of Twinless unfolds, because it’s a wonderful act of misdirection and of time doubling back on itself. But this is basically a platonic rom-com plot — one person is withholding crucial information from the other, and we wait for it all to go kablooey — and the formal daring of the first hour gives way to creeping narrative predictability.
That doesn’t really matter, though, because Twinless has genuine emotion in it, as well as moments that make us laugh and then make us wonder if we should have. As a director, Sweeney has a sharp, playful style, and he fills the movie with split screens, reflections and visual echoes. Dylan O’Brien has been kicking around since anchoring the teen dystopia of The Maze Runner franchise, and yet he’s a revelation here. He’s playing a lunkhead, but his performance is wounded, measured and delicate. The whole movie is like that, walking a sliver-thin line between heartbreak and humor.
Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101 heard Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2 here on KPBX.