“The Silent Twins” is hardly your everyday biopic. From director Agnieszka Smoczyńska (“The Lure”) and screenwriter Andrea Seigel (“Laggies”), and based on the true story of twin sisters June and Jennifer Gibbons, this film attempts to bring us inside the minds of two people who were unknowable to everyone but each other. And, along the lines of similarly boundary-pushing biopics “Heavenly Creatures” and “Frida,” the Cannes 2022 title uses stop-animation and mixed-media to underline its subjects’ intense creativity and rich interior worlds.
The Gibbons sisters, aka the Silent Twins, spent their childhood and young adulthood communicating only with one another. When I first heard about Smoczyńska’s film, I assumed that the twins had grown up in isolation and had never been taught to speak, read, or write an established language — and I was way off. Born in 1963, the British-Caribbean sisters hailed from a fairly average, stable household, with two parents and three other siblings. They developed the same speech and motor skills as other able-bodied, neurotypical children, but after a few years, became more and more co-dependent and more and more withdrawn from the rest of the world. Before long, they would only talk to each other, and often in their own dialect.
Respectively portrayed by Leah Mondesir-Simmonds and Eva-Arianna Baxter as children and Letitia Wright (“Black Panther”) and Tamara Lawrance (“Kindred”) as teens and young adults, June and Jennifer are fully capable of communicating with others — and much more than that — and yet choose not to, for reasons that are never entirely clear. Perhaps the girls’ close bond evolved into something peculiar as a result of the alienation they felt as the only Black children in their class. Or maybe each felt that her twin was the only person who truly understood her. Or it could be that the aspiring authors felt that reality could never really measure up to the elaborate fantasy world they built together.
Yet “The Silent Twins” isn’t as concerned about the why so much as the what and how of the Gibbons sisters’ story. The film presents these two young women on their own terms, from their own perspective, without feeling the need to explain or pathologize or even defend them. The June and Jennifer of this film are who they are, period. The shouldn’t have to prove their humanity to anyone, and crucially, don’t.
“The Silent Twins” opens in theaters tomorrow, September 16.
