The Twin is a thoughtless, derivative bit of horror pap that feels like it was written by a bot.
Utterly generic in every conceivable way, Finnish spooky kid movie The Twin doesn’t play a single original note, and then it plays all the derivative ones poorly. It’s fittingly been dumped to streaming where it will likely have a brief life either putting people to sleep or being turned off twenty minutes in, before it disappears from the culture completely.
Rachel (Teresa Palmer) is recovering from a terrible car accident that killed Nathan, one of her twin sons (Tristan Ruggeri). Surviving twin Elliot is the sole focus of her life now, to the detriment of her crumbling marriage to her husband Anthony (Stephen Cree), whom she to some degree blames for the crash (he’s struggled with alcohol). To escape their grief and start life anew, the fractured family moves to a small hamlet in Finland, where Anthony grew up, and takes up residence in an old rectory. Also the townspeople act weird, there’s a friendly but secretive neighbor lady, the rectory might be haunted, AND Elliot starts having visions of his deceased brother.
It’s not so much that The Twin is predictable, but more that every new possibly supernatural thing that happens is even more derivative than the last. Ghost stuff, weird cults, a little Rosemary’s Baby, a little The Good Son… these are all darts haphazardly thrown. Director Taneli Mustonen does very little to enliven things formally, occasionally breaking out some swirling camera moves to gin up some suspense and break the monotony, but nothing flashy enough to really stand out. And poor Palmer is reduced to either shrieking or crying in nearly every scene. Take a drink every time she screams her son’s name.
By the time we arrive at a crushingly stupid and thoroughly pointless climactic twist, there’s still a whopping 20 minutes of runtime left, during which we get a lengthy series of expository flashbacks making sure we know what’s really been going on this whole time, all of which is so tired and so completely well-trod by the genre that the whole endeavor might as well have been written by AI. Regardless, The Twin is a movie destined to be forgotten, but only if anyone bothers to watch it in the first place. Save yourself the trouble.
You can currently stream Taneli Mustonen’s The Twin on Shudder.
