Seconds Apart

The shadows of David Cronenberg's masterpiece Dead Ringers and Brian De Palma's Carrie loom large over Antonio Negret's strange little horror movie in which creepy and murderous identical twins Seth and Jonah (Gary and Edmund Entin) use their powers of mind control to wreak havoc on their fellow students at a Louisiana high school. Until, that is, the more sensitive one's attraction to a pretty new classmate causes a rift with his overly possessive brother that leads to tragedy. Thanks to the Entins' tightly controlled performances and Negret's canny direction, Seconds Apart does generate a mood of quiet menace, but the script fails to tie up all the loose ends, while also devoting entirely too much time to the police detective (Orlando Jones)—a man traumatized by his wife's death in a fire in which he was badly burned himself—who suspects the duo and eventually uncovers their secrets. While the film deserves credit for avoiding the excessive gore of splatter movies—preferring suggestion to graphic bloodletting—in the end it's an unsettling but also uneven oddity. An optional purchase. (F. Swietek)