Critics reviews

The film ends up doling out some fairly trite wisdom bombs and an apparently-mandatory ironic karaoke sequence (to Starship) as well as opting for an unnecessarily elaborate finale which rings more of empty cinematic spectacle than a truthful outlet for character pain.

The filmmakers think the comedy is where all the humanity is, and maybe they're right. But they don't take humor far enough. They're not that interested in the fraying psychologies, which comedy could certainly explore. Wiig and Hader make the so-so-TV banalities in the script more tolerable.

The Skeleton Twins works a bit too hard to explain the title characters' emotional problems, alluding repeatedly to a father who killed himself and trotting out a cold, loveless mother (Joanna Gleason) to boot. When it sticks to the present-tense relationship between Maggie and Milo, however, it's as rich a dual character study as the movies have seen all year, beautifully capturing the jagged push-pull of siblings with a long history of mutual dependence and resentment.

Bill Hader is amazing in this. As Milo, the depressed brother whose thwarted suicide attempt leads him from his L.A. home back to the Upstate New York town where he grew up, Hader continually modulates the smallest registers within an outsized performance... But neither of these warm cocoons of mood and cinematic looseness can withstand the grinding trajectory of the script...

These small moments are glorious ones, as is every scene with the underrated Luke Wilson, still finding subtle ways to shade his everybro persona as Maggie's likable husband in the dark. It's a shame, then, that the script (cowritten by director Craig Johnson and Mark Heyman) 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.

One of The Skeleton Twins's greatest strengths is how it handles Milo's homosexuality, or rather, how it doesn't handle it at all... Hader, for his part, couldn't be further from the Stefon register in his acting, as this is a sensitive, enormously detailed performance that grows richer and richer with each revelation about Milo's past.