The Lure direc­tor sets Eng­lish-lan­guage debut with Silent Twins

When an acclaimed direc­tor from Europe or Asia decides to try their hand at an Eng­lish-lan­guage fea­ture, it’s always a roll of the dice. You hope for a Bong Joon-ho sit­u­a­tion, in which the filmmaker’s sen­si­bil­i­ty mesh­es well with the rhythms and dialects of West­ern cin­e­ma (see: Snow­piercer, Okja), but just as eas­i­ly, the tal­ents that ini­tial­ly drew the atten­tion of glob­al audi­ences can get lost in translation.

Poland’s Agniesz­ka Smoczyńs­ka now faces this same cross­roads, as the news breaks that she’s com­plet­ed pro­duc­tion on her first film in Eng­lish. Though she shot in Poland, her lat­est pro­duc­tion Silent Twins takes place in Wales, where a pecu­liar psy­cho­log­i­cal case study took a series of increas­ing­ly grim turns.

Adapt­ed from the non­fic­tion nov­el of the same name, the film will tell the true sto­ry of June and Jen­nifer Gib­bons (played by Leti­tia Wright and Tama­ra Lawrance), the lone Black kids in their provin­cial UK vil­lage. The iso­lat­ing racial dynam­ics of their com­mu­ni­ty com­pelled the twins to take solace in each oth­er, for­mu­lat­ing a pri­vate pid­gin lan­guage that drew con­cern from locals.

The film fol­lows the pair as they dab­ble in hooli­gan­ism and get forcibly com­mit­ted to the Broad­moor Hos­pi­tal for some lit­er­al atti­tude adjust­ment, a ghast­ly men­tal facil­i­ty that plunged the girls into a psy­cho­log­i­cal dark­ness which only exac­er­bat­ed what polite soci­ety saw as their abnormalities.

As the mind behind The Lure, anoth­er film about the com­plex bond between two young women placed in a demand­ing new cir­cum­stance (though they just hap­pen to be mer­maid strip­pers con­script­ed as dancers at a sleazy club), Smoczyńs­ka sounds like an ide­al fit for the material.

The ques­tion mark in the equa­tion is screen­writer Andrea Siegel, her last major screen cred­it being the fine-to-alright com­ing-of-age com­e­dy Lag­gies. A non-speak­er try­ing to make their way through the lan­guage bar­ri­er is only as good as the per­son feed­ing them the words.