The silent twins movie explained: True story, mental health, and racial injustice

THE Silent Twins tells the true story of June and Jennifer Gibbons, twin sisters born to Caribbean parents and raised in the rigid whiteness of 1970s Wales.

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Refused recognition by the society around them, the twins responded with silence.

They turned away from spoken language and created a parallel existence saturated with writing, imagination, and intensity.

Directed by Agnieszka Smoczyńska and based on Marjorie Wallace's investigative work, this is not a conventional biopic.

It slips between the harshness of external life and the densely layered terrain of the twins' interiority. Speech is stripped back.

The centre of their expression becomes gesture, written word, and shared gaze. Their mutism does not erase meaning. It sharpens it.

The most striking feature of this story is the use of animation to express the creative life of the twins. The stop-motion sequences do not soothe or entertain. They unsettle.

Figures emerge and dissolve with a waxen sheen, their faces distorted, their limbs unnatural. These characters shimmer and slump, as if caught between forming and vanishing.