Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Silent Twins’ on Amazon Prime Video, the Strange-But-True Story of Sisters Bonded By Silence

The Silent Twins (now on Amazon Prime Video) is director Agnieszka Smoczynska’s dramatic iteration of the lives of June and Jennifer Gibbons, twin sisters who for many years maintained a sort of pact of silence, rarely breaking it, and primarily only with each other. Letitia Wright (of Black Panther/Marvel Cinematic Universe fame) and Tamara Lawrance play the sisters in this BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie, which bridges the divide between their real-life struggles – in school and the mental hospital where they spent a chunk of their adult lives – and the imaginative stories they wrote in their extensive diaries, and sometimes acted out amongst themselves with puppets. Incorporating stop-motion animation and other fanciful filmmaking elements is a welcome tweak to the otherwise staid biopic genre; now let’s see if it works.  

THE SILENT TWINS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The opening credits feature stop-motion puppets and hand-crafted title cards, read aloud by actresses Leah Mondesir-Simmonds and Eva-Arianna Baxter – playing young June and Jennifer, respectively – and therefore breaking the fourth wall. That’s a compelling choice, and an ironic one, considering the twins so rarely spoke to anyone but each other. Next we see the young actresses in character, recording a “radio show” on their reel-to-reel gear, covering the topic of divorce. Precocious! Then we see them utterly silent at the dinner table with their parents and siblings, who ask them about school and other mundanities, never truly expecting answers. And their school lives are anything but mundane, where they’re the only Black students and the target of bullies who pin them down and spit in their faces. Would the situation be better or worse if they ever talked? Hard to tell. Could their silence be reactionary to such cruelty? Again, hard to tell, but that would make sense. It’s the 1970s.

Exactly how and why June and Jen behave this way isn’t clear, but it sure seems to be a co-conspiracy between them. When they’re alone in their rooms, they speak with each other in the excited tones of normal young girls (with lispy speech impediments that seem to be a dramatic interpretation of the singular language the real-life sisters created and shared). School officials soon get involved, first placing them in special education with a patient and seemingly earnestly concerned teacher, who then believes separating them is an experiment worth exploring. As you might expect, it doesn’t go well. Their story is occasionally disrupted by animated puppets – as weird and creepy-looking as they are wonderful – that depict the sisters as two purple parrots in a zoo, contemplating whether they’re the observers or the observees.

Years pass, and June is played by Wright and Jen, by Lawrance. They’re together, past school age, still isolated in the bedroom they share, filling journals with stories and poetry; they order a typewriter, take a by-mail creative writing course and submit their work to publications. They interpret the rejection letters as a need to experience life outside their window. Wayne (Jack Bandeira), a troublemaking American teen, becomes their object of – lust? Obsession? Interest? Let’s say interest. He teaches them how to get high by sniffing turpentine and smoking cigarettes, and soon, they take turns losing their virginity to him. Perhaps he inspires them to commit relatively victimless crimes, which finds them sentenced to a mental hospital indefinitely, because that’s the type of injustice that individuals with mental illnesses faced in the early 1980s. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Silent Twins finds the sweet spot between twins-stories Dead Ringers and The Skeleton Twins, with some of the mental-hospital drama of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Performance Worth Watching: Wright and Lawrance share the entirety of The Silent Twins’ heft, and tackle the type of lived-in, finish-each-other’s-sentences depiction of twins (note: in reality, they were identical; sometimes, you can’t have it all in Hollywood) that shows serious conviction and commitment to the roles.

Memorable Dialogue: June and Jen’s teacher is about to make a terrible mistake: “I think you might be a bad influence on each other.”  

Sex and Skin: Non-nude sex-having with the action happening offscreen.

Our Take: When The Silent Twins tends to list and take on a little water dramatically, we have two things to hold on to: the consistently engaging lead performances, and Smoczynska’s inspired visual storytelling. Screenwriter Andrea Seigel – adapting the nonfiction book by journalist Marjorie Wallace – is strangely uninterested in context, be it the racism the sisters experienced or the cruelty of the institution that imprisoned them for years. So it’s a story of interpersonal behavior emphasizing the twins’ tumultuous relationship, especially their codependence and competitive nature. Separate them, and they become catatonic. Keep them together, and they might end up trying to choke each other out.

And even then, the screenplay lacks focus: Marjorie Wallace (Jodhi May) is brought in as an extraneous white-savior type character, it occasionally indulges overblown fantasy sequences, the twins’ relationship with their family members is mostly ignored and Smoczynska struggles find the crux of the drama, and therefore generate tension or suspense. The director compensates for the film’s failings by shrewdly integrating stop-motion puppetry into the narrative to reflect the inner lives of Jen and June, and  illustrate their perspective on the world around them. The film finds its footing as a depiction of brooding, debilitating isolation, and a somewhat pat rendering of the stigma of mental illness. Smoczynska shows a restless, subtly experimental spirit, and Wright and Lawrance’s performances are seamlessly convincing – and both are the film’s saving grace. 

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Silent Twins doesn’t fully reward our fascination with such an unusual, potentially empathetic portrait of psychological struggle. But it offers just enough to warrant our attention.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.