Three Identical Strangers (Tim Wardle)

[Stay Puft]

THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS
Dir. Tim Wardle



IMDb page

[Stay Puft]

I'm surprised there wasn't a thread for this already. It was probably the biggest doc of the year after the Fred Rogers doc.

I ended up a nay on this one, though. The story is absolutely wild, of course, and if you know nothing about it going in that will probably be enough. But the more I thought about it afterwards the more it started to bother me. Fascinating story, but this was a bad way to go about telling that story. Wardle regurgitates the "nature vs. nurture" debate as if he wasn't living in the year twenty goddamn eighteen, his insights are necessarily superficial and unenlightening, and his storytelling is crass and manipulative (e.g. reducing tragedies to plot twists). He's so desperate to "understand" everything that happens and assign blame that the film flirts with throwing one of its own subjects under the bus. Like, yeesh. I really soured on the movie over time.

[Grouchy]

This is a very fucked up, fascinating story. As for the docu itself, I thought it was manipulative but upfront about it and therefore effective. I'm not sure it was the director's job to ask less basic or ancient questions as Puft's post seems to imply. Nature vs. nurture is hardly a sterile debate and the subject matter leads easily to that train of thought.

[Peng]

Pretty standard doc formally, and it sometimes tips over into goosing the audience too much; that matches well with the triplets' energy in the joyous first act, but then gets borderline exploitative at points when the tone gets more somber later on and it wants to make a thesis. However, this story is too amazingly crazy, especially when experienced cold, for it to not remain a wild, engaging ride all the way through. I'm reminded of Tickled's advanced words two years back and how this delivers on the hype that the 2016 film couldn't, of truth sometimes being stranger than any plot fiction can ever conjure up. 7.5/10