Three Identical Strangers

The age of documentary feature films have transformed into a narrative realm that’s so brilliant and crazy they almost feel like a fictional feature. There has been much buzz about Tim Wardle’s documentary feature Three Identical Strangers and for good reason; it’s a fantastic cinematic experience that delivers on both the emotional and intellectual levels.

The story begins in 1980 in a chance, mistaken identity occurrence when 19-year-old Bobby Shafran heads to an upstate New York community college for school. People keep waiving and smiling to him like they know him because they believe they do, “Hey Eddy, I thought you weren’t coming back this year.”

Bobby, bewildered tells them he’s not Eddy. The Kids laugh at him, thinking he’s playing a childish joke before one of Eddy’s older friends realizes that Bobby is in fact telling the truth and that he must call this number, Eddy’s number immediately.

From that point the audience is taken on a colorful ride, watching the two long-lost identical twins reconnect, share their story with the world, only to realize there’s another brother, David ; identical triplets all separated at birth.

Yeah it nuts and that’s exactly what everyone in the states at the time thought too.

Aided by the interviews of David and Bobby and the vast amount of national TV appearances and home videos made by the triplets during their reconnection the audience is brought into the fold of three identical strangers, living, reconnecting and trying to figure out their past and why or how they never knew about each other growing up?

Was it chance?

How was it that each child was set up in a distinctly different environment, such as upper-middle class, middle class and blue-color family?

Were the adoption agency representatives of Louise Wise Services, who routinely came by to film and document the kids throughout their lives there to assess if they were okay or was it for something else entirely?

Were there other, different siblings that were separated from each other without the others knowing?

Are we watching a feel-good reunion or sardonic detective film?

From the crazy, to the bizarre to the nearly unbelievably, Three identical Strangers takes the viewer on a decades long journey where you at once become thrilled, saddened and curious all within the same viewing.

There’s much more going on behind the scenes in this film and the novel concept of three identical strangers meeting each slowly becomes an afterthought because the telling truth, what this moving is actually saying leaves the audience questioning their own lives and if they truly are in control of it.