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.

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.

Their skin is white, their eyes blank or too wide, their expressions disturbing. They echo the racialised world the girls navigate and the psychological residue that seeps into their creativity. These invented figures do not offer relief.

They are shaped by pressure, distortion, and the haunting presence of surveillance.

This is an extraordinary visualisation of the writer’s mind. One does not enter a peaceful place. Instead, we see a world crammed with repetition, control, obsession, and narrative urgency.

The writing is constant. It is vivid and filled with discomfort. June and Jennifer build elaborate fictional universes, filled with invented towns, twisted characters, and violent plots. Their creativity is both a refuge and a burden.

They write because they must. They write to survive.

Selective mutism becomes a tool. The refusal to speak is resistance rather than dysfunction. Their language takes other forms – ink, puppetry, mimicry, mirror play.

The performances by Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance carry this refusal with precision and grace. Their portrayal of the Gibbons twins holds the viewer inside the claustrophobia of their bond.

Jennifer exerts more and more control over June, both emotionally and artistically. What begins as mutual dependence gradually shifts. June struggles to break free. The interior space between them becomes combative and exhausting.

After a period of arson, vandalism, and theft, the twins are institutionalised in Broadmoor, a high-security psychiatric hospital. Their silence is treated as criminal. Their imagination is read as disorder. The system responds with force rather than curiosity. There is no space for the depth of their experience to be heard. The silence that once protected them becomes another form of imprisonment.

This is not a film that resolves itself. It does not tie experience into redemptive arcs. What remains is an impression. It lingers in the body. It asks difficult questions about power, about how imagination is shaped by exclusion, about what happens when young Black girls are written off before they are ever read.

The story does not conclude. It presses inward. The Silent Twins is a study in creative life forged under pressure. It honours the difficulty of being seen and the cost of being ignored. It carries grief, beauty, and brilliance in equal measure.

It asks us to look more closely at those who turn away, and to listen more carefully to those who write in silence. It lays bare the unyielding need in real writers to create, to write, to observe – even when unseen, even when unheard.

*Gillian Schutte is a film-maker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.

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