Dank, dirty family secrets bubble to the surface in Ed Perkins’s Tell Me Who I Am, an examination of a bond gone awry between British identical twins in the reconstruction of a twisted past. The documentary registers like a grimmer, less nakedly emotional version of last year’s Three Identical Strangers, an inherently more flamboyant and cinematic tale, but it brings a restrained power of its own to bear.

Sons of eccentric, affluent parents, Marcus and Alex Lewis grew up in a rambling large house outside of London. We will get to know this dwelling well—the camera seems to roam ominously over every cranny of it, establishing it as a silent, baleful third character in the narrative. Silence and darkness in the home and spooky music suggest that all is not well, a suspicion augmented by some odd details in the boys’ upbringing that flash warning signs early on.

At 18, Alex suffered from a nearly fatal motorcycle crash in 1982 that plunged him into a coma and wiped away every shred of his memory. It fell to his twin brother to get him up to speed on the details of their lives together. Alex relied on Marcus to provide everything from the forgotten names of mutual friends to tableaux of their shared home life. “He had blind faith in everything I told him,” reflects Marcus.

Misplaced faith, as it turned out. After the death of the twins’ mother, a search of the house turned up sinister clues pointing to secrets, and Marcus’s reassuring tales of a happy family were exposed as a sham. “I made a life for him that didn’t exist,” Marcus admits. Alex is stung and embittered by the betrayal. “How could we have secrets? We don’t have secrets. We’re twins,” he asks plaintively.

Years of estrangement followed. The last third or so of the film is devoted to the twins talking out their relationship and trying to get it back on track, and the setup can feel a little awkward, like a highbrow, psychoanalytic version of reality TV.

Tell Me suffers from visual claustrophobia, shot in a limited number of locations with a muted palette of pewters and ivories with the brothers often directly addressing viewers. However, the tight focus and the occasionally stilted interactions reinforce the bleakness of the compelling family history. Tell Me Who I Am may be a narrow tale, but it is an awfully dark and sad one.