Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Taneli Mustonen
Starring: Teresa Palmer, Steven Cree, Tristan Ruggeri, Barbara Marten
Having scored a breakout cult hit with his 2016 slasher
Lake Bodom, Finnish director Taneli Mustonen makes his English language
debut with The Twin. Set in his native country, it's a movie that mixes Finnish folk
traditions with a hefty dollop of American horror movie clichés.
Set in the 1970s, presumably to avoid the storytelling inconveniences
of modern communications devices, The Twin concerns
grieving parents Rachel (Teresa Palmer) and Anthony (Jason Clarke
lookalike Steven Cree), whose young son Nathan died in a car
accident. Nathan's twin brother Elliot (Tristan Ruggeri) survived
the accident and finds himself uprooted when his parents relocate from
New York to Anthony's ancestral home in rural Finland.
It's here that the movie enters the realm of folk-horror, with a
setting more in tune with the 1870s than the 1970s. The taciturn locals
take to Anthony but keep a cold distance from Rachel. They have odd
practices like a "ceremonial wedding swing" that Rachel finds
disturbing. At night Rachel dreams of the villagers subjecting her to a
sinister ritual. Only an eccentric elderly Englishwoman, Helen (Barbara Marten), is friendly towards Rachel, whom she seems to view as a kindred
spirit. Denounced as crazy by the rest of the village, Helen warns
Rachel that something evil is coming for her surviving son, who is now
claiming to be Nathan.
So many familiar tropes are present here that you could almost play
horror movie bingo while watching The Twin. Despite a committed performance by Palmer – who has played similar
roles in Wolf Creek,
Lights Out
and The Grudge 2 – Rachel is a one-note horror heroine,
the classic young wife whose husband thinks she's mad, and much of the
movie follows the Rosemary's Baby template. Then we have
the creepy kid in the form of her possibly possessed son, which leads us
of course into the demonic possession sub-genre. Things go full
Wicker Man in the final act as Mustonen amps up the
folk-horror.
With its pedestrian pacing and an over-reliance on characters
explaining the plot, The Twin never quite manages to make
anything exciting from its various borrowed ingredients. Despite a
fantastic setting, Mustonen rarely builds much in the way of atmosphere.
The horror is rarely constructed through visuals, rather we're asked to
take certain characters' word for it that something spooky is afoot.
This makes sense when the movie finally reveals its hand with a late
twist that will likely provoke groans from most viewers, but that's
scant compensation for those of us who settled in to watch what we
presumed was a supernatural horror movie.
