Mark Reviews Movies: THE SILENT TWINS

The Silent Twins, Focus Features

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | September 15, 2022

At some point in their youth, identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons simply stopped talking to other people, only communicating with each other away from curious eyes and ears. Their story is the one of The Silent Twins, which is mostly a shallow and straightforward biography with flashes of inspiration. We come away with little understanding of the Gibbons sisters, except that they could have accomplished much with their lives if not for their silence and whatever caused it.

To be fair, it's clear that screenwriter Andrea Seigel and director Agnieszka Smoczynska don't want to linger on those causes or the sense that the sisters' quiet existence is tragic in some way. From the start, the filmmakers try to inject a degree of joyous creativity into the movie, as the two actors who play the younger June and Jenner, Leah Mondesir-Simmonds and Eva-Arianna Baxter respectively, read the opening credits, stylized in stop-motion animation (They praise a couple of their co-stars—or appreciate an amusing name—and sound ecstatic to read their own introductions). While the world might not have understood the sisters, they saw it in a unique way, and Smoczynska wants to communicate that fact.

At a certain point, though, the tragedy of the story of the Gibbons twins becomes unavoidable. In focusing on the characters' flights of imagination and creativity, the movie doesn't prepare itself—or us, for that matter—to confront the ultimate results of their shared condition.

The story here, based on the non-fiction book by journalist Marjorie Wallace (who, as played by Jodhi May, appears later in the tale to interview the sisters), hints at much about the sisters' childhood. We see the two alone in their bedroom, speaking freely and openly while playing a game of pretending to be radio DJs.

As soon as their mother Gloria (Nadine Marshall) enters the room, though, the girls stop speaking mid-sentence. Their father Aubrey (Treva Etienne) is frustrated with the increasingly difficult situation of his younger daughters' silence, especially since they used to talk and socialize before moving to England from Barbados. Like many of the supporting characters, the parents mainly exist to offer a detail, an observation, or an attitude about the girls and then float into the background.

At school, June and Jennifer, the only two Black children in sight, are regularly bullied, and at an annual vaccination event, a visiting doctor notices that the two don't speak, are inseparable from each other, and seem anxious about any kind of contact with anyone else. He suggests special education, by way of a school run by Tim Thomas (Michael Smiley), and when that schooling and therapy don't help, Tim recommends separating the sisters.

It doesn't last for long, though. Years later, teenaged June (Letitia Wright) and Jennifer (Tamara Lawrance) are living back at home, spending more and more time in their room, and coming up with a plan to become famous writers.

Part of the intrigue and the frustration with Seigel's depiction of these characters is how contradictory they can be. The most obviously unique aspect of the siblings is their silence around others, but alone together and coming up with stories on their own, there's a richness of language and ideas within those writings and, using dolls that they have made or collected over the years, little dramas they perform in their bedroom. Smoczynska continues to use frame-by-frame animation with those dolls and figurines to dramatize a couple of those stories, although only one of them—about a doctor trying to save his sick newborn's life—seems to really matter to the story the filmmakers want to tell.

The biggest contradiction, though, is perhaps how these two, who seem antisocial and unaware of the world beyond themselves, are fairly ordinary when it comes to teenage concerns. The two sister fight and become jealous of each other, as siblings do, although sometimes those brawls can be quite violent. They both fall for the same guy, a troublemaker named Wayne (Jack Bandeira), trying to catch his attention with such relatively innocent acts as writing messages on cigarettes as a gift and with such extreme ones as breaking into his family home to rummage through his bedroom.

Either on their own or through the rapscallion's influence, June and Jennifer start a rebellious streak of taking turns having sex with Wayne and, eventually, starting a life of crimes of increasing severity. That pattern of behavior eventually lands them with an indefinite sentence to a high-security psychiatric facility, which is nowhere as luxurious as it is in their fantasies of a secluded life together.

The movie's central contrast, then, is between the characters' inner lives, which are routinely ordinary with glimpses of the potential for the extraordinary, and their external behavior, which comes to define who they are to the world at large. The filmmakers make that distinction quite apparent, especially in the juxtapositions of fantasy and reality. Because the concerns of the movie are primarily biographical and mysteriously tragic at the end, The Silent Twins struggles to find some meaning within those disparities.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the Book

Buy the Book (Kindle Edition)