The Twin is much more than meets the eye and we love when a movie surprises us, don’t you? Couple that with Teresa Palmer and Steven Cree, give us some popcorn and we’ll be ready to enjoy…and to write a review.
Here we go!
The Twin joins Teresa Palmer and Steven Cree in a new adventure after A Discovery Of Witches. Rachel and Anthony are very different from Diana and Gallowglass, though. They’re a young couple who have just lost one of their children and they share the pain, the mourning, and the hope of being able to start a life away from all this that will help them heal.
The film, at first glance, looks like a horror movie. In fact, it has tense moments that keep you on the edge and the occasional shock. But when you look closer, you realize that The Twin isn’t about that, it’s about the pain, the trauma, and the way our minds try to protect us from it.
Rachel and Anthony have just experienced a traumatic experience and horrible loss. No parent should bury their kids. But they had to do it…and they had to go on, if not for themselves, then for their remaining son.
Neither of them is okay, even if they try to be, and that’s fine. Sometimes, it’s okay to not be okay. And The Twin perfectly shows this in its first minutes. We see Rachel and Anthony grieve for their lost son and hold hands all the way, leaning on each other, giving each other strength and comfort.
Later, The Twin changes and surprises us by being something…we didn’t think it could be. In a good way. The film ceases to be a horror film to become an example of how our mind tries to protect us from pain when it is so big that it bends us in half.
I didn’t expect The Twin to be on Rachel’s mind. It was a twist that her mind created to protect herself from the fact that she had lost her child. Sometimes, the pain is too much, too big, too intense… and we’re so desperate to change our reality, to feel that everything is fine and nothing has changed, that our mind protects us by creating exactly that: an oasis in the middle of the desert.
The Twin was Rachel’s oasis…the problem was that she was missing out on it. Anthony doesn’t know how to help her, he can’t find a way to get close to try to stop her from falling down the rabbit hole. In the end, he finds an unorthodox way of doing it, and for a moment, I felt like Rachel was reacting to the truth, to him…but that soon faded.
Rachel was too lost in her own reality for Anthony to be able to reach her. That place, that reality, is the only one where she feels safe and happy. And she’s going to do whatever it takes to protect her, to protect him from her. She’s trying to fix what is broken. Rachel is trying to protect her son, trying to fix the fact that she couldn’t protect him earlier, that she couldn’t stop him from dying.
Her oasis, her happy place, is built by layers of guilt, suffering, and pain…but it’s the only thing she has. And she’s going to protect it tooth and nail. That’s why she can’t let Anthony take it from her. She’s going to protect her son’s tooth and nail. Because that’s what a mother does.
The struggle with Anthony and his subsequent shocking death is an accident. Rachel didn’t mean to do it, she didn’t want to kill him, she was just fighting, fighting for her and her little one with her life… and everything came crashing down.
Rachel loved Anthony and the reality that he is gone left her in an even darker place. She can’t accept what happened…so a new happy place is created where her and Anthony’s twin sons are still with her, right next to her, enjoying a family trip.
Rachel ends up lost, sheltered, and trapped in her own mind unaware of reality, her reality. The shelter her mind built to protect her from it ended up swallowing her. Because, sometimes, it’s easier to live in fantasy than to continue in reality, don’t we all feel that?
PS: In some moments of The Twin I felt that Diana and Gallowglass had their happy ending.
The Twin is available now to watch on Shudder.
