Netflix’s ‘Tell Me Who I Am’ is The Most Compelling Documentary You’ll Watch This Year

Warning: This article contains potentially triggering content pertaining to sexual abuse, as well as Tell Me Who I Am spoilers, a new Netflix documentary.

Thanks to Tell Me Who I Am, a new Netflix documentary out this Friday, I almost missed a deadline. I usually watch my Netflix screeners in 20-minute increments, on my lunch break or between articles. But once I started watching Tell Me Who I Am, I didn’t want to stop. That’s the kind of movie that Oscar-nominated director Ed Perkins and Oscar-winning producer Simon Chinn made—one you won’t be able to tear your eyes away from.

The documentary’s subjects are Alex and Marcus Lewis, identical twin brothers who are now in their 50s. When they were 18, growing up in a wealthy, aristocratic family in Sussex, England, Alex got into a motorcycle accident. He fell into a coma for six weeks, and when he woke up, he had lost all of his memories. He didn’t remember his house, he didn’t remember his childhood, he didn’t know what country he was in, and he didn’t recognize his own mother. But by some mystery of twin biology, Alex instantly recognized Marcus as his brother and someone he could trust. When the brothers’ parents proved to be less-than-helpful in Alex’s slow recovery, it became Marcus’s job to tell Alex his life story.

Marcus started Alex with the basics: Here’s what a table is, here’s what a TV is, here’s where you sleep. He showed him pictures of their childhood. He re-introduced Alex to his friends and girlfriend, who they didn’t tell about Alex’s condition and which, apparently, wasn’t much of an issue. Alex accepted everything Marcus told him without question. He didn’t press on any particular topic and filled in the blanks based on the idyllic families he saw on TV. If Marcus told him they took a family vacation to France one summer, he assumed they did that every summer. It seemed to Alex that he had a happy, normal, and fairly privileged childhood.

These days, amnesia stories have a reputation for being a bit hokey, perhaps because they’re a favorite of soap operas, Lifetime movies, and Sherlock Holmes fanfictions. Just this summer, Netflix released its own paint-by-numbers take on the cliché in Secret Obsession, starring Brenda Song as a woman with amnesia who can’t trust her so-called husband. In the face of those over-the-top storylines, it’s easy to forget why amnesia is such an alluring device in the first place: Because when done right, it makes for a really, really good story.

Tell Me Who I Am does it right. The documentary is neatly organized into three acts: Alex, Marcus, and Alex & Marcus. The two brothers, who also co-wrote a 2013 memoir of the same name with writer Joanna Hodgkin, calmly tell their story in separate talking-head interviews, interspersed with dramatic reenactments of their childhood home. Perkins partially lights his subjects with harsh, white light while keeping half their face in shadow, for a nice dramatic effect.

The hints that the Lewis brothers did not have a happy childhood begin in the first act, which is told from Alex’s point of view. It’s revealed that the brothers were not allowed to go upstairs in their own home. In fact, they didn’t even sleep in the house—they slept in a converted garden shed. Alex, with no other frame of reference, assumed this was normal. But he began to feel he was missing something when their stepfather was diagnosed with cancer and, as his dying wish, asked his sons for forgiveness. Alex said yes, but Marcus said no. When asked why, Marcus simply replied, “It’s complicated.” When their mother died five years later, the brothers found a cabinet of sex toys while cleaning out their childhood home. Alex was shocked, Marcus was not. When they discovered a photo of themselves as young boys, naked with their heads cut out of the photo, Alex asked Marcus point-blank if their mother had sexually abused them. Marcus nodded yes and then refused to speak to him in any more detail for the next two decades. He was determined to spare Alex from the trauma that still haunted him.

Marcus partially opened up in 2013, in an article for The Sunday Times of London which then became a book. The article and book focused on their mother as a sex addict but shied away from the brothers’ own abuse and trauma. Alex still didn’t know the whole story, and he wanted more answers. He gets them, amazingly, on camera in the final act of Tell Me Who I Am. Alex and Marcus have a frank, face-to-face conversation, and though Marcus can’t bring himself to relive the trauma to his brother’s face, he does recount what their mother did on camera in a separate interview. He then sits with his brother as Alex watches the tape. The two finally find closure, together, on what has been a mystery to Alex for so many years.

Tell Me Who I Am takes a few cues from 2018’s Three Identical Strangers—another buzzy, jaw-dropping doc dealing with identical siblings—in the way it carefully unfolds its dark tale in the most compelling way possible. And like Three Identical Strangers, the exploitative nature that comes with the very human fascination with other families’ deep, dark secrets is countered by the clearly therapeutic aspect of the film, as is the sometimes-problematic trope of using sexual abuse as a plot twist. The brothers work through their trauma in real-time, and it’s clearly beneficial to them, with the help of an accomplished storyteller, Perkins, and the therapists he consulted. Perkins and Chinn— the latter of whom won the Academy Award for Searching for Sugar Man and Man on Wire—collaborated last year on the Oscar-nominated documentary short, Black Sheep, and I’d be surprised if they weren’t nominated again for Tell Me Who I Am. In the new era of these cinematic, page-turner documentaries, Tell Me Who I Am is not to be missed.

Watch Tell Me Who I Am on Netflix