Three Identical Strangers is a 2018 documentary film directed by Tim Wardle, about the lives of Edward Galland, David Kellman, and Robert Shafran, a set of identical triplet brothers adopted as infants by separate families. Combining archival footage, re-enacted scenes, and present-day interviews, it recounts how the triplet brothers discovered one another by chance in New York in 1980 at age 19, their public and private lives in the years that followed, and their eventual discovery that their adoption had been part of an undisclosed scientific "nature versus nurture" study of the development of genetically identical siblings raised in differing socioeconomic circumstances.[3]
The film describes how Robert Shafran discovered that he had a twin brother when he arrived on the campus of a New York community college and was constantly greeted by students and staff who incorrectly recognized him as Eddy Galland. The two eventually met and, finding out both had been adopted, quickly concluded that they were twins. Months later, the publicity of this human-interest story reached David Kellman, whose resemblance and matching adoption circumstances indicated that the three were actually identical triplets.
The triplet brothers found themselves alike in many ways and celebrated their newfound brotherhood. They had the same taste in food, smoked the same brand of cigarettes, all wrestled in high school, and showed signs of separation anxiety as children. They quickly became a minor media sensation, appearing on talk shows such as the popular Phil Donahue Show. They moved in together and opened a restaurant named Triplets, which they operated together.
The triplet brothers had been involved as children in a study by psychiatrists Peter B. Neubauer and Viola W. Bernard, under the auspices of the Jewish Board of Guardians, which involved periodic visits and evaluations of the boys, the full intent of which never was explained to the adoptive parents. Following the revelation that the boys were triplets, the parents sought more information from the Louise Wise adoption agency, which claimed that they had separated the boys because of the difficulty of placing triplets in a single household. However, upon further investigation, it was revealed that the infants had been intentionally separated and placed with families having different parenting styles and economic levels – one blue-collar, one middle-class, and one affluent – as an experiment on human subjects. During the documentary, the question is asked by the siblings if perhaps they, and other sets of twins involved in the study, were chosen because their parents had reported signs of mental illness before having children, but one researcher interviewed denied this flatly, saying the research was simply about parenting.
Over time, however, differences among the three men became apparent, and their relationships with others experienced difficulties. All three had struggled with mental health problems for years, and Galland died by suicide in 1995 following a diagnosis with manic depressive disorder.
The results of the experiment never have been disclosed by the adoption agency or the psychiatric team. At the end of the documentary, text explains that David and Bobby had both been granted access to heavily redacted records of the experiment as a result of the documentary.
Reception
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 96% based on 186 reviews, with an average rating of 8.2/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Surreal and surprising, Three Identical Strangers effectively questions the nature of reality and identity."[7] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 81 out of 100, based on 30 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[8]
Related works
The Neubauer twin experiment was first publicized in a 1995 New Yorker article by investigative journalist Lawrence Wright,[9] who appears in the film. The same, never-published twin study was the subject of the 2007 memoir Identical Strangers written by Elyse Schein and Paula Bernstein[10] (who also appear in the film) and the subject of the 2017 documentary The Twinning Reaction,[11] followed by the 2018 television episode Secret Siblings.[12] The studios Raw TV, Film4 Productions, and Sidney Kimmel Entertainment are jointly developing a dramatic feature version of Three Identical Strangers, with the documentary's director Tim Wardle as an executive producer.[13]
