Fan­ta­sy col­lides with insan­i­ty in the first The Silent Twins trailer

To be filed under ​“based on a true sto­ry”: twin sis­ters Jen­nifer and June Gib­bons moved with their fam­i­ly to Haver­ford­west, Wales in 1974, while they were still in the for­ma­tive years of child­hood. A lack of exter­nal accep­tance from their pre­dom­i­nant­ly white com­mu­ni­ty sent the girls’ psy­cho­log­i­cal devel­op­ment off course, lead­ing them into a spi­ral of delu­sion and extreme behav­ior end­ing in tragedy.

This strange, sad tale forms the basis of The Silent Twins, the lat­est film from Poland’s Agniesz­ka Smoczyńs­ka, best known for direct­ing the killer mer­maid-strip­per musi­cal The Lure. As we can see from the trail­er released online just this morn­ing, both films blend inter­ludes of fan­ta­sy with sober­ing dos­es of real­i­ty, as women trapped in dire sit­u­a­tions turn inward for solace they can’t find elsewhere.

Leti­tia Wright and Tama­ra Lawrance por­tray the Gib­bons sis­ters in adult­hood (young­sters Leah Mon­de­sir-Sim­monds and Eva-Ari­an­na Bax­ter han­dle the girl­hood years of the first half) as they hit puber­ty with full force, find­ing them­selves alter­nate­ly thrilled and con­fused by adult attrac­tion and sex­u­al­i­ty. In their attempt to nav­i­gate a matu­ri­ty increas­ing­ly alien to them, they sink deep­er into a men­tal inte­ri­or­i­ty con­veyed through crinkly stop-motion inter­ludes and the occa­sion­al Bus­by Berke­ley-style syn­chro­nized swim­ming number.

Here at LWLies head­quar­ters, we’ve been some­what split on the film since get­ting an eye­ful back at Cannes; your hum­ble news aggre­ga­tor was quite tak­en with Smoczyńska’s vision of delir­i­um, while edi­tor Han­nah Strong was more ambiva­lent in her first-look review. ​“Despite the noble inten­tions of Smoczyńs­ka and her screen­writer Andrea Seigel, The Silent Twins is a broad strokes attempt at show­ing the Gib­bons Sis­ters’ lives, one that fails to rep­re­sent the insti­tu­tion­al racism and dis­crim­i­na­tion which had a pro­found­ly dam­ag­ing effect on them…”

She added: ​“Leti­tia Wright and Tama­ra Lawrance give their all as June and Jen­nifer, and their younger coun­ter­parts are sure­ly stars on the rise, but the sto­ry stops short of con­demn­ing the cru­el­ty of the sys­tem they were raised with­in, which feels cru­cial to under­stand why they might have retreat­ed so much into them­selves and the imag­i­nary worlds they cre­at­ed together.”

Even if the gen­er­al pub­lic falls along these divid­ed lines, this could be a major entrée to main­stream aware­ness for Smoczyńs­ka, prob­a­bly the most excit­ing young direc­tor (rel­a­tive to her field, at 44) work­ing in Poland right now. Maybe now that David Bowie-sound­tracked sci­ence fic­tion opera she was try­ing to get off the ground in 2017 might gain some momentum?

The Silent Twins comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 16 Sep­tem­ber. Uni­ver­sal Pic­tures, the film’s UK dis­trib­u­tor, has yet to set a date.