Cinematic Releases: The Silent Twins (2022) - Reviewed

Courtesy of Focus Features

The strange but true story of Welsh identical twin sisters June and Jennifer Gibbons, dubbed The Silent Twins after investigative journalist Marjorie Wallace’s 1986 nonfiction book brought their tale into the public eye, told of two girls who made a lifelong pact to remain totally dead silent and only speak to each other in private and/or in code.  The story of two Black children living with their parents, sisters Greta, Rosie and brother David who found themselves ostracized at the largely White school they attended, the two eventually began speaking in increasingly unintelligible idioglossia no one else could understand and grew more withdrawn from their fellow classmates and siblings. 
 
After failed attempts at therapy and separating the duo, June and Jennifer tried their hand at writing books and soon pooled together enough unemployment benefits to publish a novel entitled The Pepsi-Cola Addict.  Despite their minor successes, the two eventually got involved in drugs, alcohol and vandalism landing them in infamous Broadmoor Hospital (where Bronson stayed at one point) for eleven years.  During that time, Marjorie Wallace caught up with the twins and made national headlines.  Soon after The Silent Twins became something of a media sensation and on the BBC a 1986 TV film based on the book was made.  Years later a documentary film Silent Twin – Without My Shadow came about and around 2011 a stage play was made.

 
When the time came for a major motion picture to be made of this stranger-than-fiction coming-of-age tale awash in still unexplained neuroses and mental health disorders, The Silent Twins big screen adaptation penned by Andrea Seigel could’ve been another by the numbers dramatic procedural destined for awards bait before eventually languishing on repeat telecasts on the Lifetime Network.  But in the hands of Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska, best known for her comedy-horror mermaid musical The Lure followed by the surreal identity crisis drama Fugue, this British-Polish co-production represents the director’s third (and first English language) feature simply put is one of the best films of the year next to no one saw or talked about.  A crying shame as it cements Smoczyńska arguably as the best Polish film director working today.
 
Opening on a playful stop-motion animated title-sequence that soon becomes a recurring bookending motif throughout the picture, The Silent Twins plunges us into the colorful, bright and talky world shared between June (Letitia Wright) and Jennifer Gibbons (Tamara Lawrance) before violently yanking us back into the cold, sterile, sickly blue-green reality inhabited by their fellow humans.  Their parents Gloria (Nadine Marshall) and Aubrey (Treva Etienne) have their hands in the as to what to do with more troubling news from parent-teacher conferences and soon school therapist Tim Thomas (Ben Wheatley stalwart Michael Smiley) tries unsuccessfully to communicate with The Silent Twins and/or separating them.  Eventually their foray into drugs, sex and vandalism landing them in an asylum makes the film a steady descent into surreal madness with distinct callbacks to the director’s previous works that are as dark as anything she’s ever rendered.

 
Winner of the Golden Lions Award at the Gdynia Film Festival and a top-to-bottom cinematic tour-de-force from the new Polish master featuring arresting and dynamic camerawork from right hand man Jakub Kijowski (The Lure; Fugue) in their first 1.66:1 film together, visually The Silent Twins is stunning.  Featuring many of the director’s dark blue-green lit asides throughout peppering her first two features interspersed with bright and colorful vistas of the titular Silent Twins frolicking in fantasyland, the film’s visual aesthetic like the director’s prior features is striking in the contrast between warm saccharine dream and cold near-colorless reality.  There’s a wealth of camera movement that will remind some viewers of Benoit Debie’s rotating top-down camerawork for Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void and soon even the film’s stop-motion animated sequences take on darker tones.
 
Then there’s the film’s electronic score by Marcin Macuk and Zuzanna Wronska who both contributed to the iconic soundtrack to The Lure which is just as powerful of an artistic and dramatic component to The Silent Twins as is the chilly cinematography.  Much like The Lure, the score flirts with playful candy-colored dreamland, itching to burst into song and leaving an overall character over the proceedings.  Contributing original songs as well, some of which play over key montages which somehow or another end up in that same Polish nightclub that opened The Lure and cameoed in Fugue, Smoczyńska’s unrelenting uncompromising yet nonjudgmental observance of this most unusual twosome takes on a musicality that further blurs our expectations of what the drama or the escapist musical should offer.
 
Performance-wise Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance all but completely submit themselves to the roles of June and Jennifer who are alive, cheerful and talkative in secret but forlorn and mute out in public.  Both actresses are tasked with taking on heavy portrayals of anxiety and distress with more than a few painful-to-watch borderline psychotic fits of hysteria and/or violence.  The grief and frustration on the parents played by Treva Etienne and Nadine Marshall is palpable and soon their dilemma becomes ours as we watch helplessly as The Silent Twins start to fall in with the wrong people.  Michael Smiley is always dependably good though he’s far more subdued here than his craggy scruffy alchemist in A Field in England.  Still, debatably the film’s real star is the director who doles out every eye-defying cinematic trick up her sleeves while making the surreal exercise affecting and involving.

 
Despite the pedigree of the cast and production and relevance of the subject matter, Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s third entry into the Polish Film Institute came and went quickly without much noise at all.  Drifting under the radars of filmgoers thanks to a miniscule release not helped much with a user-friendly trailer hiding the film’s bold idiosyncratic attitude, The Silent Twins disappeared quickly from the public eye before being forgotten.  Whether or not the film finds an audience remains to be seen but for me personally Smoczyńska is something of a filmmaking black angel: a brooding auteur keen on evoking the adolescent female experience onscreen while wallowing in darkness desperately searching for the light.  Despite the minimal returns and absence of dialogue among most filmgoers, this is another brilliant, confident and daring cinematic exercise from the young Polish master cementing her reputation as one of the most exciting and visionary visual artists working today.

--Andrew Kotwicki