Dispatches From Sundance 2025: 2 Titles Of Note

From Sundance 2025: Stories Of Grief, Human Connections & New Beginnings

Sundance favourites Twinless and Sabar Bonda depict how tragedy reshapes lives, creating space for transformative bonds and a rediscovery of hope. Ishita Sengupta writes.

GRIEF is a curious thing — it isolates, unmoors, and yet, in its strangest moments, it binds people together in ways they never anticipated. In its wake, relationships often emerge from the most unexpected corners, offering glimpses of solace and shared humanity. At Sundance 2025, two remarkable films — James Sweeney’s Twinless and Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda — beautifully capture this paradox, crafting intimate narratives of loss that transform into stories of connection and quiet resilience.

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Sabar Bonda: An Assured Debut That Is Many Things, All At Once

Much like its lead characters, Sabar Bonda is a film that is many things at once. It is a story about companionship and a story about loss. Much like how for both Anand and Balya their sexuality is a part of their identity and not their whole self. A sense of grief pervades through every frame of the narrative, deftly weaved through the tenderness that unravels at the forefront. It comes together with aching clarity at the end when Anand weeps for his father. Here too truism is bartered for thoughtful ingenuity.

He cries not because he was misunderstood by his father but because he was understood by him, and now the person was gone. Anand cries because he lost the man he loved and who loved him back. This distils the intent of Sabar Bonda that it is love and not lovelessness, which is the most definitive proof of love.

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James Sweeney's Twinless Is The Breakout Film Of 2025

Two men meet at a bereavement group and form an unlikely relationship. At one level it suggests a solid bromance, which Sweeney commits to but it is also a marvel what he does with the premise. The filmmaker (he has acted in the film as well) designs Twinless as a raging dark comedy that represents introverts and their attachment issues with more lucidity than I have seen in years, and makes astute observations about relationships, masculinity, and grief with one unassuming question: how do you cope with the loss of a twin?

In his hands, this inquiry assumes existential multitudes with the idea of twinship doubling up as a stand-in — for soulmates, and the examination of one opening as an exposition of the other. Denis (Sweeney) and Roman (Dylan O'Brien in a career-defining turn) meet at a group where everyone has lost a twin. Roman’s brother Rocky died suddenly and he has been struggling since. As he keeps waking up from recurring nightmares and struggles to venture out alone without meeting sympathetic gazes from strangers, he dials up the funny stranger he had chanced upon. Denis readily agrees.

Read more on Twinless

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