Film Review: Tell Me Who I Am

Coming Soon Cobalt Blue When an aspiring author and his free-spirited sister both fall for the enigmatic paying guest at their home, ensuing events rock their traditional family. Operation Mincemeat Two British intelligence officers hatch an outlandish scheme to trick the Nazis and alter the course of World War II. Based on a true story of deception.

Munich – The Edge of War At the tense 1938 Munich Conference, former friends who now work for opposing governments become reluctant spies racing to expose a Nazi secret. High in the Clouds An imaginative young squirrel leads a musical revolution to save his parents from a tyrannical leader. Based on a children’s book by Paul McCartney.

When Did Alex Lewis Wake Up From A Three-Month Coma After A Motorcycle Crash?

Tell Me Who I Am opens on a tragedy: in 1982, Alex Lewis woke up from a three-month coma after a motorcycle crash and could remember nothing about his life except for one thing: the face of his identical twin brother, Marcus Lewis. And yet it was true,” Ed Perkins, the film’s director, tells TIME. As the men explain in the film, after 18-year-old Alex woke up from his coma unable to remember anything, from his own name to where he was, he returned home with his family to start rebuilding his identity.

Imagine how scary that would be,” Marcus says in the film. Their father is stern and distant, while their mother remains in denial that her son has lost his memory, particularly of her role in his life. “What you might ask is, ‘Surely you realize this is not how other people live?

You wake up and you have absolutely nothing, no memories at all, no reference point for anything. The only thing you have is that bond with your brother.” Alex believes their family is “normal” until after his mother’s death, when he finds hidden in her belongings a photograph of him and Marcus as boys, showing them from naked the neck down, with the strip of the photograph containing their faces cut off.

The Lewis brothers wrote about their experience in a book of the same name published in 2013, but left out the details that make the final act of the film—the moment of confrontation between the brothers—so emotional. Perkins says the scene in which the brothers come to a full understanding of what happened in their lives came after years of him getting to know both men and gleaning that Marcus “knew deep down he hadn’t given his brother what he really needed.” The director says he spent about three years just getting to know the men before beginning any filming.

It’s been a real journey. There were a number of times when Alex and Marcus pulled out of the project.” In Perkins’ view, after speaking at length with both men, Alex needed his brother to give him all the information so he’d know who he really was.

Today, Perkins reports, Marcus and Alex, “live incredible and emotionally rich lives. I really hope audiences are left with a feeling of hopefulness.” Tell Me Who I Am is a difficult watch that includes graphic details about child sexual abuse.

“There isn’t anything between them anymore.” Write to Mahita Gajanan at mahita.gajanan@time.com.

What Has Been Overused In Movies?

Amnesia has been so overused in movies — a convenient narrative device that effectively forces characters to become detectives into their own past — that it’s startling to encounter a film in which someone really does lose his memory. What’s doubly fascinating about the true-life case of Alex Lewis, in which the surprises just keep on coming, is that the one person the young man recognized when he awakened from the coma following a brain-wiping motorcycle accident was identical twin Marcus, who’d shared many of his formative experiences. That question and countless others drive director Ed Perkins’ puzzle-box portrait “Tell Me Who I Am,” a neatly constructed re-creation of the process by which Alex Lewis relied on Marcus to fill in the gaps of his missing identity.

For those wanting to discover every twist of this psychological profile for themselves, I may already have said too much. Like Alex, audiences come in blind, trusting the filmmakers to paint a picture, and this one gets progressively darker as it goes. The first enigma involves the twins’ parents, a wealthy and well-connected couple who appear to have been unusually strict with their two sons, forbidding them access to certain parts of their spacious but overcrowded home.

Those buildings feature here as well, lit in eerie blue light and captured from disconcerting angles, like the establishing shots from a horror movie. But is this merely a ghost story, or are the terrors somehow greater? Exactly what kind of evil haunts the geography of the twins’ childhood?

And who were the presents from, if mom and dad weren’t the gift-giving type? And then in the last segment, the two brothers sit down face to face and confront the reality of the past. Normal is what you know, and normal is what your family is.”

If your head is spinning with thoughts of child abuse and possibly even pedophilia, you’re not far from the truth — although as Alex says when Marcus finally comes clean, “I just didn’t know the magnitude of that.” Some details, such as why Marcus insisted on denying his father’s dying request for forgiveness, are never given satisfying answers. Actually, none of the movie’s answers are satisfying in the conventional sense, although Perkins does delve quite far into some of the most sinister aspects of the twins’ upbringing.

In the documentary, the director appears to be interviewing the twins separately, but he’s really just filming them as they recite their own story. Here, the process merely points the way to an even deeper mystery.

Who Wrote The Documentary “Tell Me Who I Am”?

It was a universal phenomenon long before the likes of Jay Gatsby turned it into an American pastime, or the internet made us all into avatars of ourselves; the ability to refract one’s own image is an intrinsic part of the human experience, even (or especially) when it’s expressed through subconscious forces like denial, repression, and personal bias. And yet, this is something we do to each other all the time in real life, often without malice. From the moment we’re born and our parents begin shaping the world into their own kind of sense, who we are is to some degree inextricable from who we are told that we are.

It’s hard to imagine a more crystalline look at the suppleness of someone’s self-identity (and the moral dilemma of someone else choosing to overwrite it) than Ed Perkins’ “Tell Me Who I Am,” a documentary so harrowing and horrific that it can only bear to scratch at the surface of its remarkable story. It begins with a terrible accident in the English countryside circa 1982, and the irresistible silver lining that a teenage boy saw wrapped around it.  When twin brothers Alex and Marcus Lewis were 18 years old, the former was involved in a motorcycle crash that left him with severe long-term memory loss, and essentially turned him into a blank slate. Marcus delighted in filling all of the gaps that he could, reintroducing Alex to their friends and regaling him with second-hand memories of old family trips.

In hindsight, the ominousness of it all is oppressive, and Perkins tells this story with a somber quality that prepares you for the discomforting truths to come. Alex and Marcus are the only voices present in the film, and it’s striking from the start that Perkins isolates them into different spaces; their talking head testimony was recorded separately, and on opposite sides of the same colorless room. Even when the film cuts between the brothers, it’s as if they’re speaking at each other, and not in conversation.

Alex, who had no reason to doubt the world as it had been presented to him, didn’t even begin to learn the truth until his mother died when he was in his thirties. That’s when he found the keys that opened the room that contained the box that hid the evidence of the repeated childhood trauma that Marcus had been trying to protect his brother from for more than 15 years. If the person you loved most in this world was magically freed from the worst memories you ever shared together — if their deepest scars were somehow healed overnight — would you choose to readminister those wounds?

Or, like Marcus, would you try to share in that gift of oblivion? What happened, of course, is that Marcus saw himself reflected in Alex as much as Alex saw himself reflected in Marcus. It was inevitable.

How Long Did Ed Perkins’ Documentary About Alex And Marcus Lewis Last?

Ed Perkins’ chilling documentary about twins Alex and Marcus Lewis, identity, memory, and family secrets is compelling and heartbreaking. “We talked for five years at the pub, always separately.” “We said crazy things,” said Alex, “and we never once talked about this. ‘” said Perkins.

Netflix Chinn feels strongly that they were right to let the movie gestate for five years. When we did the movie, it did not take that much pushing me to take it all out. I was terrified.”

The next step was to show Alex what Marcus said, and for the brothers to talk to each other. “We didn’t want to do it,” said Marcus. “I wanted to do it,” said Alex.

I wanted the truth.” “I didn’t know,” said Marcus. You can see it,’” said Alex.

“Are we done?” Marcus asked. “We’re done,” said Alex.

But the book gave the Lewis twins a public profile in England, and the owners of the house they grew up in wouldn’t let them shoot there. “That means as close as these guys were, emotionally they were far apart.” The filmmakers made certain changes based on the brothers’ feedback.

Said Perkins, “I respect that, having gone through something so traumatic, they are amazing parents. The film goes to difficult places, but leads up to a place of real hope.” Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news!

What Is The Name Of The Email That Amc Sent To You When You Purchased Your Ticket?

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How Does Tell Me Who I Am Tell The Story Of Alex And Marcus?

Every week, new original films debut on Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services, often to much less fanfare than their big-screen counterparts. Cinemastream is Vox’s series highlighting the most notable of these premieres, in an ongoing effort to keep interesting and easily accessible new films on your radar. But Marcus was holding something back.

Tell Me Who I Am narrowly but successfully pulls it off by letting the brothers delve into the rawness of their relationship. But it’s still gripping. Alex and Marcus wrote about their experience in a 2013 book by the same name but left many of the details vague about what actually happened in their lives.

The movie first lays out the story of the accident and Alex’s recovery, letting both brothers tell what happened separately. Marcus reintroduced Alex to their mother, his friends, his whole life. And as they sorted through her house, Alex started to suspect something was wrong based on items found in the house.

For decades, Alex lived wondering what happened, and Marcus — who had repressed the childhood memories in order to be able to function — refused to tell him, reasoning that he was protecting his brother by doing so. Filmmaker Ed Perkins smartly structures Tell Me Who I Am to build to a meeting between the two brothers in which they share the screen for the first time and talk to one another about what happened, in a raw scene that exposes just how much damage was caused by the abuse (which involves rape and child sex abuse from their mother and other people). And ultimately, the film is not just a wild and nearly unbelievable story; it’s a rumination on the lasting effects of sexual abuse, the complicated question of “good” lies, and the moral quandary that comes along with withholding painful information.