Surface-Level Adaptation The Silent Twins Quiets Agnieszka Smoczynska’s Style

Studios: Hire horror filmmakers to direct your dreary based-on-a-shocking-true-crime sludge. It’s the fastest way to make those projects interesting, even if it won’t guarantee they’ll be good. Imagine if, for instance, Spotlight replaced Tom McCarthy with Tobe Hooper. Sounds like an infinitely better film, right?
Focus Features had the right idea hiring Agnieszka Smoczynska for The Silent Twins, adapted from journalist Marjorie Wallace’s same-named book about twins June and Jennifer Gibbons. Growing up in a community they felt rejected by, June and Jennifer retreated from the world at large, including their own family, and chose to communicate only with each other. Theirs is an engrossing story, otherworldly on the page, stranger than most fiction, and a natural fit for genre cinema despite that whole pesky “true” detail.
The problem is that Smoczynska brings her flare in fullest possible force, and this is only enough to steer The Silent Twins away from tedium. Given that films like it tend so often to be tedious, this qualifies as recommendation: Smoczynska has a point of view and a personal sense of style, and neither are forbidden from influencing The Silent Twins’ production. But as talented as she is, the sound of her hands banging against the other side of the screen can be heard through most of the film’s 113 minutes. The material’s particulars give Smoczynska ample opportunity to show off her creativity, but those same particulars hold her creativity in a cage she can’t break out of.
That makes The Silent Twins a singularly frustrating experience. When Smoczynska gets to make an Agnieszka Smoczynska film, it’s engrossing. When she only gets as far as making a standard biopic, it’s a letdown, though in letdown mode, it’s still a treat that she got called up at all. The Silent Twins’ combination of innate unease and bonded sibling protagonists feels tailor-made to fit Smoczynska’s directorial credentials; her best-known film, 2015’s The Lure, likewise fixates on sisters living as outsiders, and concerns itself with loss of voice as a subtheme. The difference is that The Lure is about man-eating mermaids, and The Silent Twins is decidedly not.