Though it has a lot of appealing elements, The Twin's script could've used a few tweaks.
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A big part of horror's recent resurgence has been a full-throated embrace of "on the nose metaphors." Or put another way, using the genre as a means of grappling with horrific human experiences including uncertainty, family turmoil, and the big one: grief. Which is both a blessing and a curse for filmmakers because while a few years ago, your indie horror movie all about how grief tears apart an individual or family might stand out, now it's contending with mainstream horror flicks that are addressing the same idea like say...Weapons. I bring all of this up because I think today's movie The Twin would've gotten more grace from me a decade ago, but now, its flaws stand out.
The Setup
The movie centers around Nicholas, an artist who experiences a terrible tragedy when his young son dies in an accident. Now struggling to cope with his grief and after a stint in a mental institution, Nicholas sets up shop in his grandmother's old home to clean the place up, start making art again and hopefully improve his mental health. But the house also invokes memories and a malevolent force from Nicholas' childhood that threatens to swallow him up.
There's a lot of things I like about The Twin. I think it's well-acted with an especially charismatic turn from Mike Flanagan's favorite character actor Michael Longstreet as Nicholas' appointed psychiatrist, there's a number of truly terrifying individual scenes and setups, and I think the movie demonstrates a lot of empathy and sympathy for people who experience trauma and subsequent mental health struggles.
I also think the movie has a problem. It's not glaring, but it's something that stood out the more I ruminated on the movie. What is it? Put simply, I think the movie is at odds with the story it's trying to tell and good intentions vs genre conventions.
But explaining why involves a mild spoiler so....mild spoiler ahead. What the audience learns is that Nicholas is experiencing a genuine mental health crisis triggered by the trauma of losing his son. We also learn that Nicholas' break with reality may have occurred much earlier than we expected and could harken back to his childhood. Put simply, the malevolent force that's tormenting Nicholas is either a literal or metaphorical representation of trauma-induced schizophrenia.
Not a bad setup. But also one you need to be very careful with because of what your movie could end up saying about mental health struggles.
And The Twin is not always careful seemingly to fulfill the genre conventions.
I'll give a demonstrative example: the scene where Nicholas' son dies vs. how the movie handles the son moving forward.
I was genuinely impressed with how the film portrayed the tragic accident. It has all of the dread a scene like that should/would have and invokes all of the proper horrific emotions in the audience. We see what's about to happen, hear one sound, then Nicholas' reaction. We don't need any gruesome or triggering imagery. The movie trusts that the audience will be impacted by the implication.
Until it doesn't and the "entity" starts tormenting Nicholas with recreations of the accident that killed his son or quick, horrific insert shots, of the aftermath.
Which is what you do if you're trying to amplify the terror, but not what you'd do if you're telling an empathetic story about mental health and grief.
The movie is loaded with so many decisions like this that only seem to exist to make the horror movie premise work. Like...why on earth would Nicholas' wife force him to live in this house that holds trauma for him alone? Or as fun as Longstreet's Dr. Beuamont is, why does he do things that clearly put Nicholas in active danger? Because this is a horror movie. And being alone in a creepy old house is horror movie 101.
None of this is movie-breaking per say. It's still pretty effective in the moment. But the more I sat with it, the more obvious The Twins flaws became. Which isn't something you want in the crowded grief-oriented horror movie landscape.
The Verdict: A Missed Opportunity
Though it has a lot of appealing elements, The Twin's script could've used a few tweaks. 5/10
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