General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Twin Town (1997 film)

Twin Town is a 1997 British black comedy crime film directed by Kevin Allen, written by Allen with Paul Durden, and set in Swansea, Wales. It follows Julian and Jeremy Lewis, two drug-taking, car-stealing brothers known locally as "the twins" even though they are not twins, who take revenge on a local businessman after their father is injured working for him and refused compensation.¹^•² The film stars real-life brothers Rhys Ifans, in his first major movie role, and Llŷr Ifans, alongside Dougray Scott.³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Kevin Allen (his debut feature), screenplay by Allen and Paul Durden⁴
UK release	11 April 1997; 99 minutes; certificate 18; languages English and Welsh¹
Principal cast	Rhys Ifans (Jeremy Lewis), Llŷr Ifans (Julian Lewis), Dougray Scott (Terry Walsh), Huw Ceredig (Fatty Lewis), William Thomas (Bryn Cartwright)⁵
Executive producers	Danny Boyle and Andrew Macdonald, the director and producer of Trainspotting²
Budget and box office	Budget $3,300,000; worldwide gross $1,039,657, of which $127,923 was domestic (US)⁶
Critical reception	46% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 13 reviews; 89% audience score⁷
Festival and awards	Screened at the 47th Berlin International Film Festival in 1997; composer Mark Thomas won a BAFTA Cymru for the score in 1998⁸

Spoilers

Plot

The Lewis family lives in a caravan on a mobile home site in Swansea. The brothers Julian and Jeremy spend their time joking around, taking drugs, and stealing cars. Their father, Fatty Lewis (Huw Ceredig), falls from a ladder while doing roofing work for Bryn Cartwright (William Thomas), a wealthy local businessman and small-time gangster. When the brothers demand compensation and Cartwright refuses, they seek revenge.¹

The feud escalates from trivial deeds into progressively nastier behavior by both sides, ending in murders. Caught up in the conflict are two local police officers, Greyo (Dorien Thomas) and Terry Walsh (Dougray Scott), who are on Cartwright's payroll, which compromises their conduct.⁹ Roger Ebert, the longtime film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, described the film's mix of elements: beatings, a murder, drugs, two crooked cops, the destruction of a soccer field, karaoke sessions, a massage parlor, and an ending involving a local choir.¹⁰

Production and the Trainspotting connection

Origins. Kevin Allen, an actor making his debut as a feature director, conceived the film after making Rotten to the Core, a BBC video documentary about Glasgow's ice-cream wars. He first imagined it as what he called "a tight-arsed, over-worthy piece of issue-led docu-drama" and turned it into a comedy because, he said, comic writing was easier to get commissioned.¹¹ The film was produced by Peter McAleese, with production companies including Agenda, Aimimage Productions, and Figment Films.¹^•⁴

The Welsh Trainspotting. Danny Boyle and Andrew Macdonald, respectively the director and producer of Trainspotting (1996), took executive producer credits on Twin Town, and Allen had a small part in their film. Allen admitted that without the huge success of Trainspotting his own debut would almost certainly not have been made, and Polygram marketed the film as "the Welsh Trainspotting", complete with a soundtrack album.² Allen resisted the label, telling The Independent that "this film is not a Welsh film", though it had "an intrinsic Welshness because we set it in Swansea"; he also insisted that neither he nor Durden had seen Boyle's film when they started work.¹¹ Critics generally judged the comparison unflattering to Twin Town: the Irish Times reviewer Michael Dwyer wrote that it did not approach Trainspotting in scale, ambition, or achievement, and appeared designed merely to shock.¹²

The film was shot on a tight schedule; a BBC2 behind-the-scenes documentary reported an eight-week shoot compressed into six weeks with a first-time director.¹³ It was filmed around Port Talbot as well as Swansea, with several scenes shot outside Swansea railway station.¹⁴^•¹⁵ The British Board of Film Classification recorded the production year as 1996 and classified the cinema version, distributed by Polygram Filmed Entertainment, on 24 January 1997.¹⁶

Reception and box office

Critical response in 1997 was mixed to negative. Rotten Tomatoes records a 46% Tomatometer from 13 reviews against an 89% audience score.⁷ Ebert gave the film two stars out of four, writing that he was not sure where the movie wanted to go, and that while Trainspotting confidently distinguished between comedy and the appalling, Twin Town was less sure-footed.¹⁰ The Washington Post's Desson Howe called it a mean-spirited farce in which the humanity and the punch lines were missing.¹⁷ The Los Angeles Times found that the comedy turned so savage it was difficult to keep laughing after an engagingly rowdy start.¹⁸ Reviewers did single out the leads: Time Out wrote that Llyr Evans and Rhys Ifans displayed a louche rude-boy energy that betokened fine things for the future.¹⁹

Commercially the film was modest by international standards. Box Office Mojo records a budget of $3,300,000 and a worldwide gross of $1,039,657, with $127,923 of that from the United States, where Gramercy Pictures released it on May 9, 1997.⁶ A separate account gives the budget as £1.7 million.⁸ Of the three high-profile Welsh features of 1997, Twin Town reached the largest commercial audience, and its DVD sales remained strong for years afterward.²⁰

Place in Welsh cinema

1997 was described as a watershed year for English-language cinema in Wales, with three features by young directors: House of America (Marc Evans), Twin Town (Kevin Allen), and Darklands (Julian Richards). All three sought to re-read traditional ways of seeing Wales exemplified by How Green Was My Valley.²⁰

Irreverence and its critics. The film's trailer ran through a list of Welsh cultural emblems, from rugby and Tom Jones to male voice choirs, Snowdonia, and sheep, before asking whether that was really the sum of thousands of years of Welsh culture. This irreverent treatment of traditional Welsh representation attracted the displeasure of a range of people, including clergymen and the Wales Tourist Board. Against these criticisms, others argued that the film marked a new cultural maturity, as Wales gained the confidence to laugh at the parodying of its own cultural icons in a vein similar to the Irish television series Father Ted.²⁰ Academic commentary has noted the film's use of South Wales dialect, Welsh-language phrases, and the vandalizing of a rugby pitch as part of this clash with traditional imagery.²¹

Lasting status. Twenty years after release, scholars describe Twin Town as one of Wales's best-loved films, enjoying cult status in the pantheon of Welsh cinema, with its appeal attributed in part to younger viewers and its use of language.²² Marc Evans, director of House of America, offered a retrospective judgment that his film and Twin Town were "not the first of a new generation of films but the last of the old", still preoccupied with the stereotypes of an older Wales even as they undermined them; Justin Kerrigan's Human Traffic (1999) has been seen as the fuller break with that representational past.²⁰ In 2024 the cast reunited for La Cha Cha, a film written and shot on the Gower Peninsula during the pandemic.¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026