Review: The Twits is Netflix's first Dahl dud

Jim and Credenza Twit are the most miserable people you can imagine. They live in a dumpy mansion of a house, full of weird machinery and filth. They hate everything, including each other, which makes them a weirdly perfect couple. The only thing they love is the bizarre and dangerous Twitlandia, an amusement park they've erected on their property that is certainly not up to code. In fact, on the very day they plan to open the park to the public, it's promptly condemned for being a safety hazard and (more distressingly) smelling like putrid hot dog water. There goes that dream.

The latest in Netflix's exploration of the worlds of Roald Dahl, following the streamer's acquisition of the Roald Dahl Story Company in 2021, is also the first that's animated (it won't be the last). Netflix previously released the incredible (and underseen) musical movie adaptation of Matilda, as well as Wes Anderson's slew of sparkling shorts, including the Oscar-winning The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. So far, so good. With The Twits, Netflix has hit a bit of a road bump in its Dahl adaptations, but not a disastrous one. Rather, it's just a bit bland and forgettable.

Based on the 1980 novel of the same name (but from my understanding, not sticking very closely to the source material), The Twits never feels like it can quite figure out what it wants to be. This starts with the animation itself. I don't think I've ever seen a movie that so clearly wanted to be (and ought to have been) stop-motion animated, but isn't. The characters and the world have a lot of design that feels like it's trying to ape a stop-motion look. The textures and shapes of the characters, the lumpiness and solidness of the environments, the way some of the action moves...you can feel the pull. At times, it you squint and tilt your head, the movie can look pleasant. But if you're not doing that, and why would you be, this is a pretty ugly affair.

It's not the worst sin for a movie like The Twits to commit. This is a movie with title characters that spend one scene spitting worms back and forth into each other's mouths. Yes, that scene made me want to puke. There's a general dinginess to the proceedings, so the movie being a little hard on the eyes it something you can at least explain away, if you're feeling generous.

It's harder to forgive the subpar storytelling, which is where this movie really comes apart. This feels like a case of a book being chosen for adaptation that didn't really lend itself well to adaptation. Skimming the synopsis of the original work, there isn't a lot there, so I can see why this film version needed to add characters and build out the world, but it also begs the question: why adapt this book at all?

This is one of those movies where you can just feel the filmmakers straining to make it all work, to stretch and pull at any thread that might give them another minute or two of screentime, or get them to the next scene. It's sort of a kitchen-sink approach to storytelling, with a bunch of ingredients thrown together that don't necessarily make sense together, and thus only fitfully bring about entertaining results. So you have the Twits and their whole deal, then you have two orphans who are leading a crusade against the Twits for various reasons, then there's the magical animals the Twits are holding captive and who are (of course) from Loompaland just in case we need to make this the jumping off point for a cinematic universe, because we're still doing cinematic universes in the Year of Our Lord 2025, right?

The Twits is a movie where a lot of things happening with silly cause-and-effect logic, but never with much weight beyond the need to have silly things happening.

But it's clearly not for lack of effort. There are some sweet and funny moments sprinkled throughout this. Having the two orphans, Beesha and Bubsy, taking the lead is a smart move. They're both lovable characters, and performed very well by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan (Never Have I Ever hive rise up!) and Ryan Lopez. They're the closest thing the movie has to an emotional glue holding it together, even if the emotion never runs that deep. There are some swings at thematic resonance, such as realizing the limits of our own control in the world, and the meaning of family (I do love a good found family narrative), but those themes are so haphazardly deployed in such a shoddy story that they don't resonate particularly well. I love to cry at movies, I long to cry at them, I'm an easy mark, but this never got me even in the ballpark of feeling anything.

Not that that's the aim of The Twits. At the end of the day, this is a fairly down-the-middle comedy with an aesthetic that makes it an appropriate-ish release for a couple weeks before Halloween. And on that front, it does what it does fairly well. What the movie does best is emphasizing how easily we can convince ourself that something is true or good just because we want it to be so, which feels particularly timely when the world is how it is. But even that bit of theming, the only bit that the film nails quite well, is somewhat undone by some limp narrative decisions in the final stretch.

But maybe I can take a page from the film's book and try to believe that it's a good movie, and that the musical numbers aren't instantly forgettable, and that the sound mix isn't horrible (hopefully a quirk of my screener), and that the story has more heart than it does. Even if I want that to all be true, I think I need to just be honest and say that The Twits is the first dud in Netflix's Dahl-verse, and hope that future animated offerings (including yet another take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) fare better.