Three Identical Strangers (2018)

Film: Three Identical Strangers
Director: Tim Wardle
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

"Truth is stranger than fiction" has always been one of the more idiotic phrases, as it's categorically untrue.  Truth, by definition cannot be stranger than fiction, because it has bounds in reality.  In real life, we don't discover a portal to another world or an undead creature walking amongst us or an alien race invading the planet.  Fiction has no parameters, truth does.  That being said, what this phrase does get to is that, without the tropes of fantasy, science-fiction, or horror to use as crutches, there are times that we have moments in truth that we wouldn't believe in fiction, where it would have been "impossible" except it really happened.  This is certainly the case with Three Identical Strangers, a shocking, engrossing new documentary that starts out with a sharp, seemingly improbable turn in its first ten minutes, and then keeps throwing jaw-dropping (there were audible "what?" or "whoa" moments from the audience throughout, including once from me) revelations nearly until the end of the picture.  To give away much more would do you a disservice, so if you haven't seen it, bookmark now and come back later as I'm going pretty heavy into the spoilers, and while I don't usually do this for documentaries, I'm issuing a big, fat SPOILER ALERT for the coming paragraphs until you've seen the picture.

(Spoilers Ahead...I'm not kidding) The film follows three brothers (David, Eddy, and Bobby) as they meet in the most unusual way possible. Bobby, one day while attending his first day at college, is confused for Eddy by a number of his fellow classmates, and eventually goes to meet Eddy, realizing in the process that they must be twins as they are nearly identical in every way despite having no knowledge of one another.  After a news story about "long lost twins" comes out, a third brother, David, comes forward and it appears that they were in-fact triplets.  The three brothers, gregarious and quite good-looking, seem a natural fit for the media circuit, and we see them appear on Donahue and The Today Show and become something of a flash-in-the-pan celebrity trio (they even have a cameo in Desperately Seeking Susan).  In the process, however, their parents slowly become suspicious as to why they had separated the children, and we learn as the film goes on that the three siblings were part of an elaborate, choreographed study that included other separated twins or multiple-birth pairs who were being studied extensively by famed child psychologist Peter Neubauer as what initially appears to be a study of nature vs. nurture in terms of psychological disorders (whether or not they are hereditary), instead becomes a study of putting children in different socio-economic backgrounds/parenting styles and seeing how they would turn out.

The film does a marvelous job of peeling this apple, frequently borrowing from proper cinematic films like The Usual Suspects in the way that it unveils mystery-after-mystery, replaying seemingly innocuous news clips that are now clues that the audience overlooked previously.  When it becomes clear that the parents had been picked years before for the adoption agency (all three brothers had three older adopted sisters so they already knew something about the parenting styles of these three families, including that one of the fathers was a "strict disciplinarian" that might not be well-suited for parenting, though Wardle seems to straddle the line a bit on having an opinion on that one), I gasped.  The coordination involved could make literally anyone paranoid after viewing this picture.  Neubauer died in 2008, so he doesn't have any interviews, but two people who worked with him on the study are interviewed, and it's quite shocking to see how cavalier they are about a study that appears to have devastated so many.

Arguably the most telling interview in the film comes in its center with a woman who served with Neubauer during part of the study as an assistant.  We open on the woman looking through photos she has taken with people like the Obamas, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton.  We're expecting that she's about to be a kind, sympathetic-minded person who will understand in hindsight how heinous this appears, how cruel it was and deeply unethical, but that is not the way that this goes.  One of the more shocking things about Wardle's film is how he never assumes bad intentions on anyone, instead letting them frame themselves against the narrative.  We see her quickly excise herself from the responsibilities of Neubauer's vision (both she and the other assistant were just "a small part of the study"), but celebrate it as well.  She's right in a way-because of the ethical standards of this study, it could (and should) never be replicated, but there is an intense amount of pride in her voice in her work, as she knows the scientific findings of such a study, even one that borders on the criminal, are strong.  It's the closest anyone will ever get to the "nature vs. nurture" question, but much like the Nazi hypothermia experiment debate, it opens up a host of ethical questions as to whether it is appropriate to use such research considering where it came from.

If there's a flaw here, it's perhaps that Wardle, overwhelmed by the twists-and-turns of these three brothers' lives, doesn't always have an opinion on where his film is going and as a result forgets to keep all of the storylines in order.  Wardle, for example, doesn't seem to have an opinion on whether or not this could be a study of import, and seems to lean toward nurture regardless of the answers of the study, influenced by Eddy's suicide considering his father was the least "loving" of the three male parents of the triplets.  He weirdly doesn't examine Bobby & David's relationship post their brother's death, as it seems like it became estranged but there's no confirmation of that other than David stating to Bobby in the only joint interview in the film "good to see you."  If the ending is meant to be about human connection, forgetting to update us on the frayed relationship of these two brother's lives feels like an enormous miss on the part of the filmmaker.  Still, though, the storytelling up until that point is riveting and edge-of-your-seat, and sharp.  I can't wait to see where Wardle goes next, as he clearly has a knack for plot, even when anchored by real life.