Three Identical Strangers

Storyline

The whole story, ending included.

Triplets separated at birth as part of a secret study; attachment theory as true crime.

In 1980 Robert Shafran, nineteen, arrives for his first day at Sullivan County Community College in upstate New York and finds that everyone seems to know him. Students greet him as Eddy. A friend of Eddy Galland's works out why, and that same day Robert meets Eddy, who was also adopted and shares his July birthday. They are twins. When the newspapers pick up the story, David Kellman, a student at Queens College, sees his own face in the photographs. There are three of them.

Tim Wardle's documentary tells what followed through archive footage, reconstructions and interviews. At first it is a fairy tale. The triplets go on talk shows in matching clothes, share an apartment, turn up in a Madonna film and open a restaurant in SoHo called Triplets. They smoke the same cigarettes, wrestled at school and like the same kind of woman.

Then the film turns. At six months old the boys had been placed by the Louise Wise adoption agency in a working-class, a middle-class and an affluent home, and for years researchers from a study led by the psychiatrist Peter Neubauer visited them. The parents were told it was a routine study of child development; no family knew of the others. When the parents confronted the agency, Robert's father went back for a forgotten umbrella and, as his stepmother tells it, found the officials toasting one another with champagne. All three brothers struggled with their mental health, running the restaurant pulled them apart, and in 1995 Eddy, who had been diagnosed with manic depression, took his own life.

The study was never published, and Neubauer's records are sealed at Yale until 2065. After the film began, David and Robert were given thousands of pages, heavily redacted and without conclusions. The end credits run over the study's own footage: the three as toddlers, each alone, doing puzzles for someone behind the camera.