Synopsis
June and Jennifer Gibbons are twins from the only Black family in a small town in Wales in the 1970s and '80s. Feeling isolated from the community, the pair turn inward and reject communication with everyone but each other, retreating into their own fantasy world of inspiration and adolescent desires. After a spree of vandalism, the girls are sentenced to Broadmoor, an infamous psychiatric hospital, where they face the choice to separate and survive or die together.
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Cast
- Letitia WrightJune Gibbons
- Tamara LawranceJennifer Gibbons
- Jack BandeiraWayne
- Jordan J GallagherRon
- Tony RichardsonDr. John Rees
- Leah Mondesir-SimmondsYoung June Gibbons
- Eva-Arianna BaxterYoung Jennifer Gibbons
- Nadine MarshallGloria Gibbons
- Treva EtienneAubrey Gibbons
- Michael SmileyTim Thomas
Recommendations
- 80
The Guardian
This is an engrossing, well-acted story – disturbing but also tender and sad. - 75
San Francisco Chronicle
What happens to the twins won’t be revealed here (those with overriding curiosity can find the Wikipedia page about them), but Smoczynska, Wright and Lawrance find the humanity and empathy in their story, if not the complex psychological reasons behind their unique lives. - 70
Screen Daily
The director of The Lure has a knack for peculiar protagonists — not to mention mixing whimsy with darker textures — but her latest provocation wouldn’t be so affecting if not for the committed performances of Wright and Tamara Lawrance, who play sisters who understand one another when no one else does. - 70
Slashfilm
Sadly, as creative as The Silent Twins is, and as much homework as the filmmakers clearly did in replicating the details of the story and the works of the twins, the film never fully says anything meaningful. Not about the real Gibbons sisters, not about race, not about mental health and its treatment in the U.K. - 70
Variety
Layering one wild formal flourish over another — from macabre stop-motion animation to elaborately choreographed musical fantasies — to channel the inner lives of two young women who communicated only with each other, keeping the rest of the world outside their circle, it’s a swing for the fences that sometimes, almost by design, spins out of control. - 67
The A.V. Club
In The Silent Twins, the Gibbons sisters are let down by a script that undercuts the unique circumstances of their lives with familiar and ultimately less compelling storytelling tropes. - 63
Washington Post
The Silent Twins doesn’t try to explain its protagonists’ affliction, but the movie does express its crushing sadness. - 58
The Playlist
As a visual offering, The Silent Twins has moments of sheer, raw imaginativeness. As a worthy study of the two central characters, sadly, it lacks the same level of vision.
