Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Silent Twins is based on the nonfiction book of the same name by journalist Marjorie Wallace, about identical twin sisters June and Jennifer Gibbons. Born in 1963 to first-generation Barbadian immigrants in the U.K., the girls grew up speaking a Caribbean creole that made it difficult for them to be understood in their small Welsh town, where they were also the only Black children. June and Jennifer soon decided to shun social contact entirely and cease speaking to anyone besides each other, communicating in their own idiosyncratic invented language. In late adolescence they turned to drugs and alcohol, and after a spate of petty crimes, including vandalism and arson, they were sentenced to indefinite detention in the notorious Broadmoor mental hospital.
The film elides June (Letitia Wright) and Jennifer’s (Tamara Lawrance) initial struggles to be understood in their local community, and doesn’t make an effort to replicate the language that they developed, instead turning its gaze on their creative pursuits as a way to explore their strange inner lives. At an early age, the girls began to obsessively document their thoughts, feelings, and fantasies through poetry and short fiction (some of which has since been lauded as an important example of so-called “outsider literature”), and The Silent Twins interweaves the girls’ contributions to the literary canon with its main narrative, and in a number of novel ways.
Throughout the film, their stories are brought to life through lo-fi stop-motion animation (by Albert Coen and Barbara Rupik), whose grubby, amateurish aesthetic is well-suited to both the naïveté of the source material and its often surreal content. In addition to this, many of the original songs on the soundtrack feature lyrics originally written by June and Jennifer, which brings a postmodern, uncanny touch to many of the film’s most emotionally potent scenes.
These imaginative flourishes are used to enliven what’s otherwise a somewhat rote retelling of June and Jennifer’s lives. The film touches on an array of fascinating and important issues—racial discrimination, adolescent female sexuality, mental illness, the role of language and imagination in structuring reality—without committing fully to any of them, and the heady thematic brew can devolve into a blurry mess. Without any clear focus, the film often seems to plod through story beats, without delving any deeper into who the twins are or what they signify.
An early scene of vicious schoolyard bullying suggests a link between June and Jennifer’s self-imposed isolation and an enforced social exclusion, and the filmmakers’ use of precise period details and relatively sparse mise-en-scène does effectively illustrate how forbidding the atmosphere of Thatcher-era Britain might have been to two young girls with Caribbean origins. But the film stops short of overt political grandstanding, and studiously avoids any kind of lurid true-crime sensationalism about mental illness or juvenile delinquency.
That’s commendable in its refusal to exploit the twins’ story, but this does limit the potential for narrative tension. And for characters with so little interest in the reality of the world around them, the broadly fact-based approach was arguably wholly unnecessary. It might have been more satisfying to see something of the girls’ perspectives foregrounded, rather than their ideas being used as window dressing for a mostly conventional account of biographical details.
The problem the filmmakers face is depicting figures who made a conscious, lifelong effort to express themselves in their own way and not be defined by others. They’re ultimately a blank slate to project our own ideas on, and The Silent Twins mostly struggles to dramatize how fundamentally unknowable they are. Relatively flat characterizations elsewhere prevent the film from really coming to life, even if the two leads are mostly successful at depicting insular girls living in a world of their own creation. Their chemistry is palpable throughout, and they regularly convey an oddly familiar strangeness without the need for attention-grabbing tics.
The closest that the film comes to merging its subjective and objective lenses is a sequence in which June and Jennifer hook up with an American teen, Wayne Kennedy (Jack Bandeira), who’s moved into their neighborhood and catches their eye when they’re out looking for some real-life romance to draw upon for their writing. Something about their pursuit and hedonistic exploits with this idealized heartthrob has a sense of unreality about it, and the scenes effectively draw together the diverse strands of the twins’ burgeoning sexuality, ambitious literary aspirations, and extreme self-absorption. But that this experience is eventually used to give a psychological motivation for their later criminal activities demonstrates the film’s unwillingness to really sit with the peculiarity of its protagonists’ unique psyches.
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