Three Identical Strangers

What the film does

The film is built in two halves. The first is the public-facing version of the triplets’ story as it broke in 1980: the accidental meeting at Sullivan County Community College, the photograph in the local paper, the rapid and shared fame, the talk shows, the restaurant in SoHo, the immediate sense of wonder. Wardle uses archival footage from the period generously and lets the triplets — and the friends and family who saw the reunion happen — narrate the months that followed in their own words. It is, for that stretch of the film, a story of a remarkable coincidence.

The second half is the unwinding of that coincidence into something else. The film traces the triplets’ growing awareness that what looked like luck had been engineered: that they had been deliberately separated, that the home visits of their childhoods had been part of a research program, that the program’s records sat in a sealed Yale archive. The shift in tone — from wonder to a sustained, careful anger — is the work the film does best. By the closing minutes the question is no longer how the brothers found each other but what was done to them, and what is still being kept.

What the film contains that other accounts do not

Two things distinguish the film as a primary source on the study. The first is on-camera testimony from Yale officials about the institutional position regarding the records — testimony that is, even on its own terms, enough to put the question of who is keeping what from whom in front of a general audience. The second is the surviving brothers’ willingness to speak about their brother Eddy and about what they understand the separation and the study to have cost him. The treatment of Eddy is careful and unsensational. It is the most important piece of public testimony from the subjects’ side that this archive is aware of, and the film’s availability is the reason this archive recommends it before any written summary, including the summaries elsewhere on this site.

Reception and effects

The film’s Sundance premiere generated immediate acquisition interest; Neon picked it up for theatrical distribution and CNN Films for subsequent broadcast. It became one of the highest-grossing documentaries of 2018 in the United States. Its critical reception was strong. The longer-running effect, more important than the box office, was institutional: in the months following the film’s release, Yale and the Jewish Board agreed to release portions of the records to identified subjects who requested them. That arrangement remains the practical mechanism by which subjects access their own files today.

Where to watch

The film is available through several streaming and rental services and is licensed for educational use. Direct readers to legitimate sources rather than to specific aggregator URLs that change over time. Public libraries in the United States typically have it in their digital lending collections. The position of this archive is that the film should be widely seen; it is the entry point this archive recommends most often, and it gives the surviving subjects their own voices in a way no third-party summary can match.