At the recent British Independent Film awards (Bifa), the prize for best joint lead performance went to Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance for their starring roles in this stylistically adventurous account of real-life twins June and Jennifer Gibbons. Other nominations in that same category included Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio for Aftersun, which proved to be this year’s big Bifa winner; Daryl McCormack and Emma Thompson for the bittersweet sex comedy Good Luck to You, Leo Grande; and Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear for the fable-like Men. All these nominations were for films in which a central pair brilliantly carry the drama, sometimes in multiple roles. Yet in the Poland/UK/US co-production The Silent Twins, Wright and Lawrance manage to convince us that they are two sides of a divided soul, with their performances perfectly balanced between osmosis and individuality.
Born on 11 April 1963, the Gibbons twins, Barbadian British children growing up in Wales, were inseparable, increasingly speaking only to each other in rushed, secretive tones that were all but indecipherable to others. Facing bullying and ostracisation at school (the education system clearly failed them, as would the health and legal services), they apparently retreated into their own private world before being dragged into the public spotlight in the 1980s after being arrested for acts of vandalism, theft and arson. Their story soon became the stuff of modern legend, inspiring dramas, documentaries and stage productions alike.
Adapted by screenwriter Andrea Seigel from the 1986 nonfiction book by the journalist Marjorie Wallace, The Silent Twins traces the lives of the Gibbons sisters from insular childhood – the young June and Jennnifer played by Leah Mondesir-Simmonds and Eva-Arianna Baxter – through rebellious adolescence, to brutal incarceration in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, where they remained for more than a decade. It is here that Wallace (Jodhi May) meets and interviews the sisters, encountering the tranche of diaries, stories, poems and novels they had compiled over the years – writings that inform the dreamlike sequences that snake throughout the film. These creative writings also provide a springboard for the extraordinary animation sequences (plaudits to stop-motion maestro Barbara Rupik) and musical fantasias that elevate The Silent Twins above the realms of a biopic into something altogether more transformative.
Such cross-generic moves are familiar territory for Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska, whose extraordinary 2015 feature The Lure (a twisted reworking of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid) recently featured as a key text in the BFI’s impressively wide-ranging horror season In Dreams Are Monsters. While The Lure has been described as “a Polish New Wave mermaid horror musical”, The Silent Twins seems to be situated in a liminal space somewhere between Peter Jackson’s 1994 movie Heavenly Creatures (another “real-life” tale filled with fantastical folie à deux invention) and Notes on Blindness, the remarkable lip-synced 2016 docudrama by Peter Middleton and James Spinney. Like the former, it treats the imagined worlds of its subjects as tangible experiences – memories rather than dreams; like the latter, it blurs the formal line between performance and reportage in a manner that is strangely immersive.
At the heart of the film’s spell lie the mirrored performances of Wright and Lawrance. At times I was reminded of Jeremy Irons’s dual role as Beverly and Elliot Mantle in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988) – one actor inhabiting apparently identical yet subtly distinctive personae. Yet while Dead Ringers is increasingly a tale of fluid personality transference, The Silent Twins allows its protagonists to flow together without diluting each other’s individuality. Even when they are engaged in a closely choreographed psychogenic fugue, Wright and Lawrance somehow manage to keep clear blue water between their respective roles.
While The Silent Twins is laudably adventurous, it is not particularly accessible fare, and some viewers may lose patience with its claustrophobic intensity, just as many apparently lost patience with the twins. But perhaps it’s entirely appropriate that a film about an impenetrable pair should itself prove somewhat impenetrable.
