A highly unsettling and provocative documentary: Three Identical Strangers

Tim Wardle's 2018 documentary, Three Identical Strangers, starts off as if it's going to be a feel-good story about triplets separated at (actually, six months after) birth who discover one another through a series of chance encounters when they're about 20 years old and who enjoy a few moments of celebrity and fame as their unlikely story is picked up by TV and print media. The three guys look and behave incredibly alike, and they're each cute and buoyant and enjoying every bit of the media attention - eventually parlaying their instant celebrity into a popular NYC restaurant/club, Triplets. But then the documentary takes some even stranger twists and turns, which I will not reveal, but it's fair to say that this movie gets darker and darker and becomes a serious examination of medical ethics, as we learn that the three boys, unbeknownst to them, had bee part of a vast (and as yet unpublished) medical experiment. Wardle and his team do a good job conveying this story and all of its nuances through interviews, use of archival footage, and some re-creation of scenes (in particular, the meetup of the boys some 30 or so years back). He also blends in interviews with journalist and author Lawrence Wright, who did extensive research for a magazine feature of twins as well as another set of twins - two young women separated at birth - who have written about the ethics of twin-studies. Some of the outside experts Wardle interviews do little to make their case and he's ruthless in his editing of their weirdly evasive interviews. All told, though there's nothing unusual or groundbreaking cinematically in this film, it's a highly unsettling and extremely provocative journalistic documentary.