Neon
In 1961, three identical triplets were born to a nineteen year old girl who couldn’t handle it so she put them up for adoption. They never knew about the other two until 1980.
Three Identical Strangers is a documentary from director Tim Wardle, and the movie is an unexpected emotional powerhouse. We start listening to Bobby Shafran, one of the triplets, now in in fifties, as he described starting at a new community college and being mistaken for someone else, someone named ‘Eddy’. It turns out that Eddy Galland was his twin, from a middle-class family in Long Island while Bobby grew up in a more wealthy home in Scarsdale.
This got some notoriety and attention in the news, to the point that other people noticed — chiefly people connected to another young man, David Kellman, raised in a middle-class family in Long Island. We see the movie move between interviews with people and clever little reenactments to help set the scene. The three brothers became close immediately and became national news, showing up on all the talk shows demonstrating the off-putting way they were similar.
But something is creeping in as the documentary goes on, something is off — one of the twins is not giving any interviews, haunting words are mentioned, and the implication is clear. The movie tells the story of what happened next, with a series of shocking twists and turns, conspiracies and deep, complicated themes. There are explicit thematic mentions of nature versus nurture, the question of how similar they are versus how they might be different.
The revelations uncovered are deeply disturbing and absolutely enthralling. I feel like it would be a disservice to provide any more detail about the movie, but I think there’s an element I can argue for. The movie hits hard into the depth of sadness and the horror that happened, but it doesn’t end in sorrow.
Some documentaries are dry and difficult to follow, but this movie is paced very well, building up naturally and cutting around old footage, new interviews, and reenactments seamlessly. The access director Tim Wardle was able to get is very effective, and goes in surprising directions. I was certainly never bored.
There are often leaps of logic made in some documentaries to make specific points, and perhaps some things are stretched here, but overall, it all follows rational and logical patterns. Three Identical Strangers is emotionally powerful, deeply troubling, and a beautiful piece of film-making. The director hasn’t done much, but this is one of the better documentaries I’ve seen in a long time.
Three Identical Strangers has a run time of 1 hour 36 minutes and is rated PG-13 for some mature thematic material.
Neon
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