‘Three Identical Strangers’ Is a Modern-Day Tall Tale with Darkness at the Edges

WEEKEND WATCH is here for you. Every Friday we’re going to recommend the best of what’s new to rent on VOD or stream for free. It’s your weekend; allow us to make it better. Check out all of our Weekend Watch recommendations here.

What to Stream This Weekend

MOVIE: Three Identical Strangers
DIRECTOR: Tim Wardle
CAST: Robert Shafran, Edward Galland, David Kellman
AVAILABLE ON: Prime Video and iTunes

The experience of watching Three Identical Strangers is the experience of someone sitting down next to you, maybe at a bar or at a park bench, and telling you the most fantastical, unlikely story you’ve ever heard. It’s a tall tale and a whopper, but it’s true: a young man starts his first day at college and is greeted by friendly strangers calling him a different name. He comes to find out about his heretofore unknown identical twin brother, separated at birth and adopted by two different families who never knew about each other. And when their story makes the newspaper, a third brother, also adopted, makes contact. Identical triplets, separated at birth, now reunited in front of the whole country.

The true story of Bobby, Eddy, and David is one that had already fascinated the American public back in the ’80s, when these revelations happened. You can see why in the footage of the boys being interviewed by Phil Donahue or Tom Brokaw, making a cameo ogling Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, opening their own restaurant in New York City called Triplets. These three gregarious boys with big wide grins, big meaty paws for hands, each sporting a glorious ’80s Jew-fro, they were made for television. They were absolutely made for the larger-than-life 1980s. The spectacle of the Triplets, that’s the story that’s been told: that they all wrestled in high school, all smoked Marlboros, all had the same taste in women, har har, har.

Three Identical Strangers, however, is like if that barroom storyteller kept going. Past the point where you were fascinated by events. Past the spectacle of it all, where you start to ask questions. Director Tim Wardle invites his audience to stay a few steps ahead of the film. We start to wonder just how coincidental this cosmic reunion really is. What about the adoption agency, the now-defunct Louise Wise Services? Why did the boys get dropped into three distinctly separate economic circumstances? Why did they each have an older sister, also adopted? Why were all three hospitalized at one point or another in their teens? The questions arise, and the answers to them pull the boys, and the audience, down deeper. The film becomes an investigation for a while, into the agency itself and the behavioral experiments they’d been up to, but the film also seeks to answer the same questions the experiment did, the nature vs. nurture questions of human behavior. Did these boys being so similar to each other despite being raised apart mean that genetics ruled all? Or were there subtle differences lurking beneath the surface that would only emerge in time. The films keeps a bit of professional distance to this stuff. Without the agency, there would have been no big reunion to speak of. No bachelor pad in Manhattan. No Studio 54 or time hanging around each other’s families. But that bitterness has certainly risen to the top, depending on which family members you ask.

The filmmakers also allow the audience to draw their own conclusions about who they’re seeing — and not seeing — in the present-day interview clips. There’s a whole other story waiting to be told here, a hammer waiting to drop, and the melancholic undercurrent that runs the the whole film, you just know will be paid off eventually, and sadly. This real-life whopper of a barroom story is no fairy tale, with no easy ending. But it’s a compelling story told by charismatic storytellers, and the odds are it will fascinate you.

Where to stream Three Identical Strangers