The results are a tad standard from a filmmaking standpoint. In the disciplined fashion of Bart Layton's “The Imposter,” Perkins weaves together reenactments and first-person accounts with little creative risk, seldom reaching the narrative jolts and scale of the superb “Three Identical Strangers,” Tim Wardle’s shocking documentary about identical triplets. But this is a different, more intimate kind of movie, with a cumulative emotional impact that is nothing short of devastating. Know that there will be major spoilers ahead; one can’t write about “Tell Me Who I Am” without getting into the details of what the Lewis siblings, well into their 50s now, have endured both as kids and adults grappling with survival wounds. The brothers were born and raised in a town right outside of London and were shaken to their core when the 18-year-old Alex had a near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1982, waking up from his prolonged coma to remember nothing and no one but his brother Marcus.

It was a new start for Alex, with the unplanned parental duties of re-teaching him everything falling onto his other half. For the next decade and change, Marcus would take Alex under his wing, educating the adult newborn on things he forgot, from the most basic to the most complex. But more importantly, he would reconstruct his brother’s sense of identity by reminding him about their mutual history brick by brick—a happy, ordinary childhood full of rosy days, family vacations and such, always with their mother Jill by their side. Marcus built it all from the ground up like a carefully curated instagram feed for his brother. Except, it was all a lie, told with humanly intuitions guided by love, through instincts both protective and therapeutic. The truth came much later when the hard-partying, hardcore hoarder Jill died of cancer in 1995, leaving her sons with a massive home filled with layers and layers of revelations, much different than the dust-pink social media-esque scroll Alex was made to browse and accept.

Revealing these appalling facts like the pieces of a puzzle in a thriller, Perkins recreates segments of the two men’s childhood home and gives us distressing glimpses of objects, the most upsetting of them (at least for a short while) being Christmas and birthday presents the brothers never got to open in their youth. But then a more troubling, even sickening, item appears—a photo of Alex and Marcus as fully naked young kids, with their heads cut off. This particular discovery leads the already suspicious Alex to ask the inevitable tough question. He learns (as we do), that Jill had abused them sexually for years, and also enabled others in her circle to routinely rape her sons. Spelled out by the film in disturbing yet necessary detail, the grim reality sends the then thirty-something Alex off to yet another journey of self-rediscovery. But this time, with the lack of a clean slate, the work required from him would be much harder. How would one cope with something so hurtful, and move forward in life knowing that his most trusted ally has been lying to him all these years?

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