The Twin

Flicking through the reviews of other people which are predominantly unfavorable by the way; I do wonder, what were they thinking? I mean, what were they expecting to see? While I understand the amount of frustration they might feel, their all-around cynical outlook, and their perspective in general; yet, I still believe, they had gone a little bit overboard with the criticisms this time.

Yes, the story is convoluted, perhaps, a little bit pretentious too; but the core notion still managed to deliver a compelling narrative (with a significant technical mastership) nonetheless. Now, I saw a lot of people complaining about the nature of the twists (or rather about how too many were there); speaking for myself though, I dug those, they kept me second-guessing up until the very end. And then came the final twist (not gonna spoil it, do not worry); caught me off-guard, I wasn't quite ready for it.

First of all, the athmosphere is nice. Teresa Palmer was pretty good as a grieving mother. But the story builds up to a massive let down. They could've skipped the whole Helen crazy woman story, that just feels like a filler afterwards. The kid is annoying, but they usually are in these kind of movies. 5,5/10.

My wife and I watched this in Shudder as she's a big Discovery of Witches fan and Teresa Palmer was in this. Unfortunately this was a mash up of several other films, with The Omen, Midsommar and Rosemary's Baby springing to mind, but without being anywhere near as good.

Palmer does a lot of the heavy lifting, and does reasonably well with quite thin material. The reveal was unsatisfactory, with a character basically reading the exposition.

On the whole, added nothing new to the genre.

The Twin has a handful of corny horror tropes: child loss, new home in the middle of nowhere, pregnancy exploitation, hallucinations, gaslighting, quasi-satanic rituals, folk atmosphere (or, at least, an attempt to create it), et cetera. Too many ingredients for one film, and eventually it's hard even to qualify the results. Is this a psychological drama wrapped in horror? Is this a horror wrapped in psychological drama? Is this a Finnish Midsommar? We wish we knew. Not even Lights Out's Teresa Palmer and the whole exotic setting ("wow, those Finns are so eerie but their nature is so beautiful") can make this ponderous mess work.

I hadn't heard about this 2022 horror movie "The Twin" from writers Aleksi Hyvärinen and Taneli Mustonen prior to sitting down to watch it. I stumbled upon the movie by random chance, and since it was a horror movie that I hadn't already seen, of course I opted to watch it.

The movie's synopsis was adequate, as there is something about twins in horror movies that just have some appeal as in regard of possible spooky storylines. However, the storyline told in "The Twin" was just somewhat mundane and generic. And the slow pacing of the narrative just made it a downright struggle to sit through this movie. While the movie runs at 1 hour and 49 minutes, the slow paced narrative makes it seem closer to three hours.

I found the storyline in "The Twin" to be somewhat without much of any appeal actually, and I have to admit that my interest in the movie was quickly waning as the storyline trotted on and on in an ungodly slow pace.

"The Twin" has a rather small cast ensemble, so it was up to the cast to put on extraordinary performances to carry the movie. I will say that the cast actually put on fair enough performances, but it was just a shame that they had so little to work with from the script.

For a horror movie, then director Taneli Mustonen took a swing and missed. This movie wasn't scary, especially not to a life-long horror aficionado such as myself. Sure, if you're new to the horror genre, then I will say that "The Twin" could offer something worthwhile.

If you are a horror fan, then I wouldn't recommend you waste your time, money or effort on "The Twin". There are far better and more enjoyable new horror movies out there.

My rating of "The Twin" lands on a generous three out of ten stars.