Cannes Review: Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s English-language debut ‘The Silent Twins’ is a bewitching ode to female kinship [Grade: A+]

Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Smoczyńska returns to Cannes four years after her Fugue premiered in Semaine de la Critique (aka Critics Week), bringing the flair from her horror-musical debut feature The Lure (2016) to match the emotional punch of her third feature. Smoczyńska has been on the European film map for a while now and her work with Netflix has brought more US attention her way. And much deserved – her films are both precise and freeing, led by uncompromising female protagonists whose journeys always reveal much of what is most ineffable. The director’s talent for constructing an alluring interior world through idiosyncratic aesthetics has peaked superbly in her newest, The Silent Twins.

Based on the eponymous best-seller by journalist Marjorie Wallace, the film tells the story of fiction writers June and Jennifer Gibbons, from their childhood years (portrayed by Leah Mondesir Simmons and Eva-Arianna Baxter) into adulthood. Their family moved from Barbados to the UK in the 1960s and settled in an all-white small-town Wales, where the sisters subsequently grew up, were bullied, and later sent to a psychiatric institution. Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance inhabit the roles of adult Jenny and June with unprecedented quietude which in turns exudes strength. Since the girls developed their fiction writing from playing with dolls and their own private language, the film is abound with impressive depictions of the creative process. In the magic of The Silent Twins, thinking and writing seem like the most pleasurable, delightfully complex acts one can engage in. This is why daily life is shown as unconditionally subordinate: first love, first cigarette, first sex: all acquires meaning only in a fictionalized world.

The twins acquired their name due to their outright refusal to communicate with other people and the film explores their interpersonal dynamics in depth, leaving a lot of breathing room for the viewer to study the minutiae of their own world. While twins often develop their own language (a phenomenon called ‘cryptophasia’), June and Jennifer’s sped-up Bajan Creole further removed them from what the small-town would be willing to digest. In the film, however, they speak English, but the poeticism borrowed from their novels and diaries has informed the pace and its ornate flow. But the narration is not the only thing that shifts whenever they are alone together: the frame itself undergoes a remarkable metamorphosis.

By swapping the greenish color palette for a rosy tint, the images of the twins’ fantasy-world gleam and glisten – the imaginative use of artificial lighting avoids the trap of overusing neons to highlight black skin and the stylization makes it all the more surreal. In this way, their fictional world becomes flesh and bone, equally tangible for the enamored viewer as it was for them. The same impressive effect is achieved by musical interludes and puppet animation – the ideas sourced from the sisters’ diary entries or poems. Smoczyńska brings life to the darkest aspects of the story with the help of her regular cinematographer Jakub Kijowski, whose camera paints a stunningly affective portrait of an impossible uncoupling.

After growing up inseparable, the sisters believed that one of them must die prematurely in order for the other to live and the film explores precisely this poetic mysticism in its second half set in Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital where they were interned for eleven years. The most touching sequences are pierced by musical interludes and dissociative moments removed from that harsh reality. The Silent Twins offers much more than delightful escapism, it is an ode to Black female power, kinship, and the ambivalence within the Gibbons sisters’ own story. With her third feature, Smoczyńska has confirmed herself a true master and the film itself a vital, indispensable piece of the cinematic imaginary.

Grade: A+

This review is from the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. The Silent Twins will be released by Focus Features.

Photo: Jakub Kijowski/Focus Features