Brothers of the Head (18)

Nicholas Barber
Sunday 08 October 2006 00:00 BST
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Fake documentaries are usually a way of producing a comedy on the cheap, but Brothers Of The Head makes altogether stranger, more unsettling use of the form. It's a gothic tragedy of conjoined twins, connected at the chest, who grow up in near-isolation on the Norfolk coast. When they're aged 18, in 1974, they're discovered by a Svengali who sees little distance between the Victorian freak show and the Seventies rock concert. He installs the siblings in a country manor, where they're trained by his minions to be the frontmen of a punk band called The Bang Bang. And you thought Liam and Noel had problems.

Adapted from Brian Aldiss's novella, the film is a nightmarish riff on the key relationship in rock'n'roll history: the one between the singer and the guitarist - sometimes brothers biologically, sometimes only spiritually - who can't live with each other and can't live without each other. Luke and Harry Treadaway, two real-life twins, are eerily perfect in the central roles. And, indeed, the entire film is such a believable time-warp that you might go home afterwards and check your record collection, just in case there's a Bang Bang single in there somewhere.

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