An incredibly unique biopic about sisters in insular world
Agnieszka Smoczynska’s strange and whimsical film “The Silent Twins” feels like a miracle. In a cinematic landscape where it seems like there’s only room for the predictably bombastic or prestigious, the heartfelt gems that manage to slip through are to be celebrated.
Adapted by Andrea Seigel from the 1986 book by Marjorie Wallace, “The Silent Twins” is a quirky and fantastical biopic of June and Jennifer Gibbons, British twins who communicated only with each other and through their creative writing. It is the third feature from Polish filmmaker Smoczynska, who broke through in 2015 with “The Lure,” a mermaid horror musical, and she brings a similarly inventive approach to the insular world of June and Jennifer.
The Gibbons’ written work has been incorporated throughout, including their poems, novels and short stories. Many of these pieces have been adapted literally, into macabre stop-motion animation sequences crafted by Barbara Rupik, whose
work is both grotesque and charming.
Smoczynska brings us into the rosy subjectivity of June and Jennifer first. It’s all close-ups and soft light as the girls play at hosting a radio program. But as soon as we see them as others do from the outside, everything is cold, dim and harsh. Their heads are bowed, engaged in a battle of wills against the world.
Leah Mondesir-Simmonds and Eva-Arianna Baxter play the twins in childhood, beautifully capturing their young lives, sweet young girls enduring bullies, special education and institutional separation. Letitia Wright portrays the adult June, Tamara Lawrance stepping into the role of Jennifer. As adults, they’ve settled into an uneasy family routine. Their parents are immigrants from Barbados, members of the Windrush
generation, recently chronicled in Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” series.
The twins enroll in a writing correspondence course, which is both their salvation and their downfall. They decide they need to experience some romance and danger for material, and seduce an American jock named Wayne (Jack Bandeira), who introduces the sisters to sex, booze and the joys of huffing paint. These sequences toe the line of reality and fiction, but their reckless actions land the sisters in the notorious mental hospital Broadmoor anyway. At 19, they are sentenced to an indefinite stay, and that is when the real horrors begin.
Seigel’s screenplay refreshingly grants us access to their interior world without much psychological explanation. But if the film is lacking, it is in its glossing over of the racism that the twins suffered in school that led to their withdrawal. Without addressing some of the external factors that led to their condition, it allows the audience to assume they’re under the spell of some unexplainable folie a deux, when in fact, their disorder does have a material genesis.
MPAA rating: R (for drug use, some sexual content, nudity, language and disturbing material) Running time: 1:53
How to watch: In theaters