Avis Metacritic

This is an engrossing, well-acted story – disturbing but also tender and sad.

What happens to the twins won’t be revealed here (those with overriding curiosity can find the Wikipedia page about them), but Smoczynska, Wright and Lawrance find the humanity and empathy in their story, if not the complex psychological reasons behind their unique lives.

The director of The Lure has a knack for peculiar protagonists — not to mention mixing whimsy with darker textures — but her latest provocation wouldn’t be so affecting if not for the committed performances of Wright and Tamara Lawrance, who play sisters who understand one another when no one else does.

Sadly, as creative as The Silent Twins is, and as much homework as the filmmakers clearly did in replicating the details of the story and the works of the twins, the film never fully says anything meaningful. Not about the real Gibbons sisters, not about race, not about mental health and its treatment in the U.K.

Layering one wild formal flourish over another — from macabre stop-motion animation to elaborately choreographed musical fantasies — to channel the inner lives of two young women who communicated only with each other, keeping the rest of the world outside their circle, it’s a swing for the fences that sometimes, almost by design, spins out of control.

In The Silent Twins, the Gibbons sisters are let down by a script that undercuts the unique circumstances of their lives with familiar and ultimately less compelling storytelling tropes.

The Silent Twins doesn’t try to explain its protagonists’ affliction, but the movie does express its crushing sadness.

As a visual offering, The Silent Twins has moments of sheer, raw imaginativeness. As a worthy study of the two central characters, sadly, it lacks the same level of vision.

However intrinsically fascinating the Gibbons sisters’ story might be, Smoczynska and Seigel’s interpretation of the material feels off somehow — a little too pleased with its own quirk, and too preoccupied with surface texture and color to help viewers truly understand its troubled protagonists.

It’s a shame that telling the Gibbons’ true story is a task too difficult for The Silent Twins, because there are real signs of promise.