Cannes Review: Letitia Wright In ‘The Silent Twins’

deadline.com:

Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Smoczynska (The Lure, Fugue) makes her english language debut with The Silent Twins, the strange and remarkable story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, twin sisters who only communicated with each other from 8 to later teen years when drugs and drinking led to petty theft and an arson charge that landed them in the tightly secured medical ward of Broadmoor  for 11 years before being released in the 1980’s.

Creating their own puppetry and dolls, poems, and music which they only broadcast for each other on a fake radio program, the “twinies” as they were called by family fell into an odd void that became more pronounced, even when they were forced to go to separate schools at one point, and they carried on this way until becoming young women landing into legal troule  until incredibly being incarcerated for over a decade, five or six times as long as the longest sentence for the petty crimes of which they were accused.In knockout performances Letitia Wright (Black Panther) and Tamara Lawrence star respectively as the older June and Jennifer Gibbons, who were born in 1963 into the only Black family in their Wales neighborhood, growing up being bullied to the point school officials had to separate them from classmates who came from the same notoriously racist and almost completely white area.

Their uniquely strange mute-like behavior in which they even walked in unison to their own rhythm did not help, and finally at age 8 they reverted together into their own reality, one where they refused to talk, acknowledge, or communicate with family or the outside world, instead creating their own world in their room, locking everyone out.There they created their own characters and dolls (visually presented in