In the 1970s, the sisters June and Jennifer Gibbons were part of the only Black family in their small Welsh town. They experienced racism at school, and were eventually institutionalized for 11 years at a notorious psychiatric hospital in Britain.
In “The Silent Twins,” a new movie about the sisters, Letitia Wright plays the docile June and Tamara Lawrance plays Jennifer, the alpha with a penchant for a fight; the actors both embody their characters with nuanced portrayals of mental illness that avoid melodramatic clichés. The actors who play the Gibbons sisters as girls (Leah Mondesir-Simmonds and Eva-Arianna Baxter) follow suit.
In the film, the twins don’t speak to their Barbadian immigrant parents, their siblings or their classmates or teachers — they become entrenched in a sometimes real, sometimes imaginary world from which everyone else is barred.
The director, Agnieszka Smoczynska (“The Lure”), attempts to draw out June and Jennifer’s taut bond through the use of voice-over of their inner thoughts and stop-motion animations featuring ghastly puppets that depict the fiction the girls write. But these elements come across as abstract puzzles themselves and don’t do much to help the audience make sense of who the girls really are.
Why June and Jennifer refuse to talk to other people or why they go on to commit arson as teenagers goes unexamined. As a result, the events of the plot barely register and the girls still feel like strangers by the movie’s conclusion.
Yet Smoczynska and her cast still manage to conjure something somatically beguiling, akin to being put in a trance. And artful, too: The desolate gray of winter in Pembrokeshire, Wales, looks arresting and sumptuous in the cinematographer Jakub Kijowski’s arresting frames.
Whatever is or isn’t broken about the twins remains a secret, but June and Jennifer’s story is played by Wright and Lawrance with the thoughtful consideration these real-life women deserve.
The Silent Twins
Rated R for sexual acts and adult language. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters.
