Here is a really heartfelt, absorbing new film telling the true story of June and Jennifer Gibbons: the “silent twins”, young women of colour who grew up in Haverfordwest in Wales communicating with no one but each other. They were effectively abandoned by the school and care systems but wrote reams of intensely imaginative poems and stories, with June even self-publishing a novel. It gained them a reputation as authentic outsider artists when, in 1981, the twins were committed to Broadmoor hospital for arson and theft. Their case was taken by investigative journalist and mental health campaigner Marjorie Wallace.
Their story has had a number of stage and screen treatments, and now screenwriter Andrea Seigel has adapted Wallace’s book about the case and Polish film-maker Agnieszka Smoczyńska directs in this UK-Polish co-production. Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance are excellent as the grownup June and Jennifer, two young women who withdraw into a vivid world of their own – to the profound dismay of their parents and intense irritation of their siblings, for whom June and Jennifer suck all the oxygen out of their young lives. When they speak it is with odd inflections, a lisp or slur that makes them sound almost Dutch. Jodhi May has a cameo as Wallace.
