The Twin

As a subgenre, it's hard to love 'trauma horror' -- with emotionally damaged characters trying to literally defeat their own demons. It's an understandable sandbox for writers and actors to play in -- as emotions ride high and audiences can connect to characters in extremis. Susceptibility to dark forces, specters from the unseen underworld who prey on the emotionally weakened individuals are as old as time. Even Shakespeare's Hamlet hatched the entire play-within-a-play to determine if his father's Ghost was telling him the truth about his murder after his own suspicions about being compromised mentally ("the Spirit I have seen may be the Devil and the Devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape, yea and perhaps out of my weakness and my melancholy, as he is very potent with such spirits, abuses me to damn me"). Is it entertaining to watch souls in aguish? I don't think it is -- which is why I still can't re-watch J**ACOB'S LADDER**, T**HE ORPHANAGE** or the original **PET SEMETARY**, so I am more or less admitting a natural bias here in this latest release from SHUDDER. (As a self-professed folk horror enthusiast, trauma horror all too often takes it toll on me -- and maybe that means I'm too afraid to take it all in. Fatherhood might be to blame for that!) **THE TWIN**, directed and co-written by J.C. Doler, stars Logan Donovan and Aleksa Palladino as grieving parents torn apart after the untimely death of their six-year-old son in a home accident. More particularly, the father, Nicholas (Donovan) suffers a mental breakdown and is admitted for psychiatric care. Upon release, Nicholas begins seeing his therapist Dr. Beaumont (Robert Longstreet, who I recognized from his collaborations with Mike Flanagan) -- and hears and sees sinister voices bent on making him regress back into self-destruction. When an evil simulacrum of his own self (Donovan playing his fetch, i.e., 'twin') stalks Nicholas in a bid to consume him, a literal fight for his sanity, acceptance and soul threaten to upend his marriage and his own life. While there is little that breaks new ground here, the film does distinguish itself from the typical fare on Shudder with standout performances by Donovan and Longstreet and the careful direction by Doler in his debut film.