All I want for Christmas is a suitably Christmassy film. But one scene set to “Mary’s Boy Child” by Boney M doesn’t exactly make The Silent Twins (9 December) a festive treat. The picture charts the troubled lives of June and Jennifer Gibbons, twin sisters of Barbadian heritage raised in 1970s Haverfordwest, where they retreated into their own private world after racist bullying. Not that you would know that from the movie, based on Marjorie Wallace’s 1986 book, which leaves social and cultural context largely unexplored even after the sisters are detained indefinitely at Broadmoor, their sentence reeking of structural racism.
Their story has already spawned a TV drama, a documentary, a 1998 New Yorker article and songs by Manic Street Preachers and Luke Haines. Yet nothing has quite unwrapped its mysteries. The director, Agnieszka Smoczynska, rips visual coups straight from the Ken Russell playbook: a Broadmoor dance number, a lake of fizzy pop in a suburban living room, stop-motion animated interludes populated by fraying, twitchy puppets.
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