The Skeleton Twins is available on Blu-ray, DVD, and On Demand.
Having both coincidentally cheated death on the same day, estranged twins reunite with the possibility of mending their relationship.
The Movie
It’s impossible to go entirely wrong with Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader. Whatever they are doing, together or separately, there’s bound to be some value in it, if for no other reason than they are involved. Of course, they’re best known for fairly broad comedy through projects like Bridesmaids and Saturday Night Live (love you bunches, Stefon!), but Wiig in particular reached broad commercial success, then mostly eschewed the big-budget limelight since 2011 to pursue smaller, more independent projects. The Skeleton Twins is one of those projects, a more somber dark dramedy where, literally, both of their characters are suicidal. There are laughs here, but they are bittersweet. If seeing these SNL alums revel in the ennui of questionable life choices sounds intriguing to you, I advise you to check out The Skeleton Twins. If that just sounds too depressing, this might not be the film for you.
Twins Maggie (Wiig) and Milo (Hader) are reunited after a 10-year estrangement when Milo attempts suicide and has listed Maggie as his emergency contact. Maggie invites Milo to recuperate with her at her home, which she shares with husband of two years Lance (Luke Wilson).
The Skeleton Twins is chintzy with the backstory; brief flashbacks give tiny clues about the twins’ histories, but it’s like peeling away layers of an onion very slowly. You have to actively infer a lot of what happened, and how it relates to their present predicaments, as things are rarely explicitly laid out — why aren’t their parents in the picture? What happened with Milo and Rich (Ty Burrell) all those years ago? Why haven’t the twins seen each other for 10 years? How did Maggie end up married to a dudebro-seeming-dude like Lance? I’m not sure I really know, even after having watched the whole thing.
This film comes at you from a lot of angles. In some ways, it’s a story about love — Milo doesn’t have enough of it, and Maggie has too much and doesn’t know what to do with it. Without getting too spoilery, it’s a story about the ethics/morality of love and attraction, and acting thereon. It’s a story about both nature and nurture — how much of what they are going through is hereditary (if I understood correctly — again, that backstory — their father committed suicide when they were fourteen), and how much is circumstance in the form a mother who — I think — abandoned them to start over with a new family? What about our personal choices? Both Maggie and Milo seem hell bent (in a subtle way) on self-destruction, each making a series of questionable choices in an attempt to find happiness. “What the hell happened to us?” asks Maggie in an introductory voice over. What indeed? What happens to anybody whose life ends up in a place they never expected? It’s easy to sympathize with Milo, a “gay cliché,” as he calls himself, and even Maggie, who’s trying (but not succeeding) to live the perfect life when it it’s obvious her idea of perfect does not match society’s. (I’ve been there, to a certain degree, and trying to keep of the façade of not being miserable can be exhausting.)
The Skeleton Twins is low key and introspective, rolling along from humor to anger to quiet desperation. It’s produced by the Duplass brothers, which probably tells you more of what you need to know about it than anything I’ve said. One of the writers called it “offbeat” and “bittersweet,” which is a decent description. It missed a few beats on occasion, but overall is worth checking out if the “suicide comedy” genre sounds like your thing.
The Package
My biggest issue with the Blu-ray was the sound; in some scenes, the background noise was more “in focus” than the actual dialogue, which was hard to catch even with the volume up. There were a lot of special features, some of which (the making-of featurette) were more interesting/worth watching than others (skip “Sweet Moves”). The deleted scenes were mostly deleted for a reason, though there were a few that included more of the twins’ backstory and would’ve been helpful to have in the final film. Features include:
- Audio Feature Commentary with Director Craig Johnson, Kristen Wiig, and Bill Hader
- Audio Feature Commentary with Co-Writers Craig Johnson (Director) and Mark Heyman, and Producer/Editor Jennifer Lee
- Deleted Scenes with Optional Commentary from Johnson
- “To Whom it May Concern: Making The Skeleton Twins” Featurette
- Gag Reel
- Outtakes
- “Sweet Moves” Featurette