Kristen Wiig continues to flex her dramatic chops in her latest starring vehicle Welcome to Me, in which she plays Alice, a woman with borderline personality disorder who wins the lottery and becomes a multi-millionaire overnight. With the means and opportunity to finally break from her carefully regimented lifestyle, consisting of medication, therapy and endless …
As The Skeleton Twins delicately soars between comedy and tragedy, it smartly peels back layers of troubled backstory for the lives of its main characters: estranged twin siblings, separated for about a decade, who share suicidal tendencies. At the very moment Maggie Dean (Kristen Wiig), a dental hygienist from upstate New York, is about to swallow a handful of sleeping pills, she receives the message that her brother, Milo (Bill Hader), an unsuccessful actor in Hollywood, is in the hospital after slitting his wrists. Suicide and dysfunction runs in the Dean household. Their father killed himself when they were teenagers, and their mother (Joanna Gleason) is a pseudo-spiritual egotist with a thick layer of delusional and emotional baggage.
Sometimes you don’t want to hear how everything’s going to be alright. You just need someone to share the chaos with you. The Skeleton Twins is about reconnecting with that someone who makes the din between your ears just a little bit quieter. Superbly acted from a pitch-perfect script, this indie darling should make its presence known come award season. More importantly, it’s imbued with a quiet dignity that rises above patronizing head pats and simple solutions. It’s messy and real and sticks with you long after the laughs have subsided and the tears have stopped flowing.