Focus Features
In 1986 the book ‘The Silent Twins’ was released by Marjorie Wallace, and told the true story of two sisters, June and Jennifer Gibbons, who were born in the 1960s and suffered from a form of cryptophasia as they only were seen communicating with each other. It was one of those sad tales that has been mostly forgotten with a few cultural things at times, like a documentary in 1994 or a London play in 2011. There was a television drama back in 1986 but there’s never been a feature film until now.
The Silent Twins, from director Agnieszka Smoczyńska and writer Andrea Siegel, starts in a fanciful place — due to the nature of the twins and their disconnect from other people, the movie dips back and forth between a muted version of the real world and an artificial world of animation and puppets. We first hear from the Gibbons twins as young girls as June (Leah Mondesir-Simmonds) and Jennifer (Eva-Arianna Baxter) introduce themselves and the movie, telling their invented stories and joking with each other.
But then the movie changes when their mother walks in the room — instantly the two stare at the floor and refuse to say anything at all. This is the situation with these two — they only ever speak to each other and otherwise seem unable to communicate at all. The two are the only black children in their small Welsh town, bullied in awful ways by the other kids and only retreating further into themselves.
After a doctor notices their troubling affect, the twins start seeing a psychologist but it’s to no help at all — so the girls are forced apart, and it certainly isn’t helping anything. After this short prologue to introduce the twins and their troubles, we jump ahead a few years to the girls as teenagers, with June now played by Letitia Wright and Jennifer played by Tamara Lawrance. Neither of the two remotely look like teenagers, but maybe that’s part of the point?
The two girls continue to have troubles with communicating, but then start to get interested in publishing creative works and decide to get involved with drugs and crime to be more inspired and get published more successfully. They get involved with a young ne’er do well guy of unclear age, which takes place over what seems like an endless stretch of the movie.
The movie has a very specific sort of dreamlike substance to it, connected to the way the twins found some purpose in creative writing and thus splits between fantasy and reality. There is an understated quality of the two actors playing the older versions of the Gibbons twins, with them putting on the affect the two women had in real life but sometimes feels like an artificial layer.
It’s hard to say exactly what the point of this story is though — these were real people and suffered in the real world. The movie implies a fantastical element to their story which blurs the line between artistic freedom and exploitative fiction — the nature of their psychological condition makes it sometimes difficult to really empathize with the two girls.
The movie struggles when it gets into the extended criminal stretch, but it has a stronger start and finish that feels at times a bit melodramatic if mostly honest. Hard to say if this will resonate with audiences, but there’s an interesting story to be told here about some people otherwise forgotten by modern history.
The Silent Twins has a run time of 1 hour 53 minutes and is rated R for drug use, some sexual content, nudity, language and disturbing material.
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