THE TWIN (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Twin, Vertical / Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 28, 2025

We return yet again to the notion that not every story benefits from being given the horror-movie treatment. In The Twin, a man must reckon with the grief of his child's death and the guilt that he feels responsible for such an unthinkable loss. How do a string of jump-scares and a supernatural or psychological monster help to tell that story?

This trend in modern horror remains a baffling one. Such stories have long dealt with very real emotions, troubles, and anxieties without trying to transform them into figurative or literal monsters. Indeed, the conceit of the monster in co-writer/director J.C. Doler's story is an old one: a doppelganger, which, as it has through folklore and literature for centuries, reflects a sense of dread and doom for anyone who happens to spot a double. Many tales have been told using that gimmick. It's potentially frightening enough without also attempting to make the double the embodiment of depression and suicidal tendencies.

That is what happens in Doler and Paul Petersen's screenplay, however, as Nicholas (Logan Donovan), an artist, doesn't pay complete attention to his young son for only a matter of a few minutes. The boy (played by Tripp Toupal), trying to help out his parents by bringing a large pumpkin from his upstairs bedroom to the garbage, trips on his shoelace and falls down the stairs. Nicholas leaves his in-house art studio just in time to watch helplessly as his son dies.

Isn't this idea horrifying enough? It is but, apparently, not in a way that can be sold as a movie or to an audience, so the son's death and Nicolas' attempted suicide days later become little more than fodder for what amounts to a haunted-house tale.

After a month in a state facility, Nicholas' wife Charlie (Aleksa Palladino), whose own feelings are completely ignored by the movie, has set up her husband in his grandmother's old house. It's a place where he won't be constantly reminded of his son, but as the prologue of his childhood in the house shows, it's also a place that seems to have an evil presence within it.

The movie, then, exists in two distinct modes. One is a fairly competent and occasionally creepy story about the awful thing that lurks in the house and/or in Nicholas' mind, tormenting him with voices, visions, and the occasional moment of some frightening thing popping up in front of or reaching out to grab him. Doler does the basics in this mode, but the house, an old and dark one with plenty of rooms and places for a ghost/monster to hide, is a fine one for this kind of story. Location can be as important to a horror story as it is to real estate, after all.

The other mode is how all of these components are meant to be a reflection of Nicholas' emotions and mental state. It becomes a lot of pseudo-psychological hooey, best represented by Dr. Beaumont (Robert Longstreet), the psychiatrist who has been appointed to check up on Nicholas daily to ensure that he is making progress and not considering another suicide attempt.

The character himself is intriguing, especially because Longstreet plays him in such an unexpectedly amiable and vulnerable way. While Nicholas is skeptical that the doctor can truly empathize with him and what he's going through, Beaumont quickly reveals that he has first-hand experience with the very tragedy Nicholas has experienced. The focus on him, though, only serves as a reminder that Charlie's grief is apparently uninteresting to the filmmakers for whatever reason.

Eventually, though, the doctor is using hypnosis to help Nicholas confront the literal demon in his head, offering such questionable insights as that the treatment of schizophrenia primarily requires someone to want to get better, and forcing his patient's neck into a noose. How can we take any of the movie's efforts to examine these delicate ideas seriously when it does so in such overblown and irresponsible ways?

We can't, really. That makes the affair difficult to outright dismiss, because some of the horror elements are effective, or to accept, because the psychological component of its narrative is so silly within the confines of a generic horror story and becomes increasingly reckless. Just to be clear, the climactic showdown, as Nicholas and his allies face off against the monster in both a dreamscape and the real, is ludicrous, too, as is the inexplicable, tasteless choice of song that plays over the end credits. The Twin really does get worse as it goes, even after the movie proper ends.

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