The Skeleton Twins

Props to the filmmakers behind this uneven yet affecting US indie for giving comics Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig a pair of roles that allow them to stretch into unexplored dramatic territory (and, you know, be funny once in a while). Hader and Wiig are used to riffing off each other on TV’s ‘Saturday Night Live’, so it helps that Milo (Hader) and Maggie (Wiig) are cranky adult siblings who share a whip-crack shorthand that longtime comedy sketch partners must know how to muster effortlessly.

Milo and Maggie have been out of touch for a decade. Both are on the cusp of giving up, he with a razor in his dingy LA bathtub, she with a brazen act of infidelity sure to wreck the perfect suburban life she’s come to loathe. Come together they do, though, and somehow, ‘The Skeleton Twins’ finds a way to explore the alternately healing and hurtful nature of nostalgia. It’s a shame that the script feels the need to lunge for buried family trauma, big reveals and hugs in its final act. There was flesh enough on these twins’ bones to begin with.