The putatively bold and experimental but ultimately dour and cold “The Silent Twins” tells the story of a pair of Beautiful Minds in deliberately unattractive fashion, almost daring the audience to remain invested in the true-life story of Jennifer and June Gibbons, identical twins in Wales who had a special way of communicating between themselves but would fall into a kind of choreographed silence whenever another person entered their world.
As much as I admired the performances by Eva-Arianna Baxter and Leah Mondesir-Simmonds as the girls as children, and Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance as Jennifer and June in their late teens and through their 20s, I was turned off by the Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s self-indulgent and often grotesque imagery, which becomes increasingly off-putting. The story becomes more about stylistic flourishes than digging deep into the mistreatment suffered by June and Jennifer at the hands of a system and a society that didn’t know what to do with them and how to accept them, and often treated them harshly.
