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What would you do if you found your doppelganger in the wild? That’s the question that opens the Netflix thriller series Triptych. When forensics agent Becca Fuentes arrives at a crime scene to find the dead perpetrator, Aleida Trujano shares her birthday and face, she’s sent down a twisty path toward the truth. Along the way, she’s helped by stripper Tamara, who also mysteriously has the same face and birthday as Becca. With the realization that she and the other two women are triplets separated at birth, Becca and Tamara set out to solve the mystery around their lineage and the sinister forces that conspired to tear the family apart.

While the Netflix show takes a turn toward the fantastic, the basic story of Triptych is, as the opening suggests, based on the true story of real scientific experiments conducted in New York in the 1960s and '70s.

The usually staid doc category is turning into this year's dishiest Oscar race.

For starters, there was the mini-controversy over Three Identical Strangers, Neon/CNN's film about an infamous study conducted in the early 1960s in partnership with Dr. Peter Neubauer and the Louise Wise adoption agency that separated twins (and one set of triplets) and put them up for adoption with different families. Journalist-filmmaker Paula Bernstein (once a TV reporter with bylines in both The Hollywood Reporter and Variety), who had written a book with her twin sister, Elyse Schein, on being part of the experiment, took a jab at ...

The usually staid doc category is turning into this year's dishiest Oscar race.

For starters, there was the mini-controversy over Three Identical Strangers, Neon/CNN's film about an infamous study conducted in the early 1960s in partnership with Dr. Peter Neubauer and the Louise Wise adoption agency that separated twins (and one set of triplets) and put them up for adoption with different families. Journalist-filmmaker Paula Bernstein (once a TV reporter with bylines in both The Hollywood Reporter and Variety), who had written a book with her twin sister, Elyse Schein, on being part of the experiment, took a jab at ...

The new documentary Three Identical Strangers tells the story of triplets separated at birth. A reunion of three identical brothers who had no idea the others existed would be powerful stuff all on its own, but there's way more to the story. According to USA Today, director Tim Wardle wants audiences to watch his documentary with as little knowledge about the Stranger Things-esque circumstances surrounding the triplets' separation as possible, but some parts of this story are just too fascinating not to share.

According to Wardle's interview with USA Today, the story began when Robert Shafran attended his first day of community college in 1980. Shafran couldn't go anywhere on campus without someone calling him Eddy. Ultimately, Shafran contacted Eddy Galland, and together the brothers realized they were both adopted and shared the same birthday. Neither set of their adoptive parents had any idea that the baby they had adopted also had a twin.

Editor’s Note: If you’re planning to see Three Identical Strangers, you might want to wait until afterward to read this story, which contains spoilers.

The chilling new documentary Three Identical Strangers takes moviegoers on one wild ride.

What starts out as the heartwarming tale of three fun-loving, 19-year-old New Yorkers who learn they’re identical triplets separated at birth takes several crazy turns.

The film veers into disturbing territory when the brothers and their adoptive families learn that the triplets – and other multiples – were split up as part of a secret social experiment.

“This was a really bad thing,...

In 1980, a 19-year-old man named Robert Shafran walked on campus for his first day of college. To his bewilderment, the kids greeted him as if they knew him already and were surprised that he was back. It didn’t take long for Robert to figure out that he had an identical twin brother named Eddy about whom he knew nothing. After they met, and it was reported in the press, yet another identical twin brother named David contacted Robert and Eddy.

Director Tim Wardle’s carefully structured and suspenseful documentary “Three Identical Strangers” starts at this point where all the brothers first met, and it mimics the “can you believe it?” tone of their initial press. Robert, Eddy, and David made the rounds of all the talk shows in 1980 and became media celebrities. They also all moved into the same apartment in Manhattan, and they enjoyed some wild times.

The...

Separated at birth, then reunited at age 19 in 1980, New York triplets Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland, and David Kellman became the toast of the talk-show circuit after learning that they were long-lost brothers. Though their story received considerable exposure at the time — making them a welcome fixture at Studio 54, landing them a cameo with Madonna in “Desperately Seeking Susan,” and so on — the public tended to focus on the inspirational reunion rather than asking questions about the circumstances of their adoption.

Turns out, the brothers’ story is much bigger and more complicated than anyone imagined, and is only now being properly revealed, thanks to director Tim Wardle’s jaw-dropping decades-later doc “Three Identical Strangers.” A gripping, stranger-than-fiction account of a real-world medical conspiracy, the film begins as a human-interest story and builds to an impressive work of investigative journalism into how and why they were placed with the families who raised them.