113 min | R | September 16, 2022 | Focus Features
June and Jennifer Gibbons are identical twins who speak to no one but each other. They write novels, chase boys, set fires, and land in Britain’s most notorious psychiatric hospital. The film captures their private world better than it explains why anyone outside it failed them.
June and Jennifer Gibbons are identical Black twins growing up in 1970s Wales. They speak to no one but each other. Their parents, their teachers, and eventually a string of doctors read the silence as stubbornness, then as illness, then as threat. Inside that silence the girls build a complete world. They write novels, invent elaborate fictions, and police each other with a closeness that turns violent. The film is about two people who become a single sealed unit and the institutions that have no idea what to do with them.
Letitia Wright plays June and Tamara Lawrance plays Jennifer as two halves of one strained organism. Wright gives June a flicker of wanting out, a hunger for a separate life that she cannot act on. Lawrance plays Jennifer as the heavier gravity, the sister who pulls the other back whenever escape looks possible. The two actors share a clipped, halting speech that they use only with each other, and they make the rivalry inside the bond feel like suffocation. Leah Mondesir-Simmonds and Eva-Arianna Baxter play the younger twins and establish the private language before the adults take over. Nadine Marshall plays their mother Gloria as a woman who loves her daughters and has stopped trying to reach them.
Agnieszka Smoczyńska directs from a script by Andrea Seigel, and she refuses to film the twins from the outside. She stages their stories as stop-motion interludes and fantasy sequences, so the audience sees the worlds the girls build instead of just their blank faces. The camera saturates the Welsh suburbs into something dreamlike and poisoned. The production design treats their shared bedroom as a closed laboratory of dolls, diaries, and ritual. The score and sound design lean into the girls’ interior register rather than the documentary facts of the case. The approach makes the inner life vivid and the outer chronology hard to follow.
The trouble is that the same stylization that opens the twins’ imagination keeps their reality at arm’s length. The film moves through years and institutions in fragments, and the cumulative damage registers less than it should. By the time the story reaches Broadmoor, the emotional weight has thinned out into atmosphere. There is a haunting true story here about two girls failed by every adult around them, and the film circles it without breaking it open. What remains is a vivid, inventive portrait that admires its subjects more than it understands them.