YNOT at the Movies

The Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska seems to have a particular interest in unconventional sisters. Her previous film "The Lure" (Córki dancingu | 2015) unfolds a bizarre fantasy tale about two mermaid sisters interacting with humans. Her latest film, "The Silent Twins" (Poland/UK/USA 2022 | 113 min.), however, is not a fantasy. It is based on a sad true story about two identical twins who shut off the rest of the world and only communicated between themselves. While the film attempts to understand their self-contained world, it fails to answer the burning question about why they behaved the way they did. Instead, the film provides a sketch of the two extraordinary sisters' artistic traits.

Born in 1963, the twin sisters June Gibbons (Letitia Wright, and Leah Mondesir-Simmonds as the younger) and Jennifer Gibbons (Tamara Lawrance, and Eva-Arianna Baxter as the younger) live in Wales with their immigrant family from Barbados. As the only kids of color in school, they are often the target of bullying. For reasons unknown, the twins withdraw and stop communicating to anyone else except among themselves.

The young twins act like two synchronized swimmers and mirror each other. Their strong will of not talking to others, including their parents, is both stunning and mysterious. If bullying at school is the trigger of their behaviors, why don't they even talk to their parents?

When they are in their own room with the door closed, however, not only do they talk like regular girls, but they also nourish their artistic and creative side of their personalities. They want to be writers and they make puppet dolls, and they share their desires, jealousies, dreams, and fantasies.

For the twins, not to communicate doesn't mean not to interact with the outside world. They actually get into trouble with the law for theft and arson, and they are locked up in a mental hospital indefinitely by the British government.

In her storytelling, the director Agnieszka Smoczyńska often blurs the imagination of the twins and their reality. It reaches a point that the film becomes confusing sometimes about what's real and what's not. The film also uses quite a few stop-motion puppets to narrate the twins' stories. It provides a glimpse of the mysterious twins' artistic minds, but the visual can be disturbing.

From the very beginning, we are haunted by the question of why the twins decide to be silent. They risk losing everything to keep that incomprehensible vow. Knowing their art and writing doesn't help us understand the twins better. By the end of this melancholy film, they remain as mysterious as when we first met them.

"The Silent Twins" opens on Friday, September 16, 2022.