Three Identical Strangers

Interesting and reasonably well-made, but morally questionable in how it presents some of the material

I'm sure it all started with some distinguished psychiatrist and a roomful of people, and the brilliant idea arises of a new way of studying nature versus nurture. "Okay, we’ll separate these kinds and watch them grow." This is nightmarish, Nazi shit.

• Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein quoting Bobby Shafran; Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited (2007)

What is the primary factor in making us who we are? Were the truly great figures of pure evil – Elizabeth Báthory, Adolf Hitler, Harold Shipman, Peter Scully, Adam Sandler – always destined to become who they became, or are there to be found moments and influences in their environment which turned them into the monsters with whom we're familiar? If our destiny is genetically encoded at the moment of our conception, can we really say there is such a thing as human agency? In short, it's the age-old question of nature vs. nurture; does biological determinism supersede free will? Focused on precisely these questions, twin studies involve researching twins to so as to compare and contrast the importance of genetic factors against environmental factors. A branch of behavioural genetics, when most people hear the term "twin studies", they probably think of Josef Mengele's sickening experiments in Auschwitz. However, these experiments were inhuman and not even remotely typical of scientifically approved twin studies, which are an accepted, if somewhat controversial, attempt to determine the etiology of differential psychologies in individuals who are genetically similar. And these are the murky waters charted by director Tim Wardle's Three Identical Strangers. Covering some of the same ground as Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein's book, Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited (2007), and Lori Shinseki's documentary The Twinning Reaction (2017), the film...