The Twits (2025)

Screaming Into The Void At 2 AM Because Netflix’s 'The Twits (2025)' Shattered My Childhood and Put It Back Together Wrong (In A Good Way)

Official Poster

​I’m sitting on my bedroom floor right now. It is exactly 2:14 AM. My feet are cold, my eyes sting from staring at a massive silver screen for two hours, and there is this weird, hollow ache in my chest that I didn’t expect to have tonight.

​I went to see The Twits (2025).

​Let that sink in. A 2025 big-budget animated adaptation of the nastiest, dirtiest, most beautifully mean-spirited book Roald Dahl ever wrote. The book I used to read under my bedsheets with a plastic dinosaur flashlight when I was eight years old, smelling the cheap, yellowed glue of the paperback spine. I remember running my fingers over Quentin Blake’s jagged, chaotic ink drawings, feeling this strange mix of absolute disgust and hypnotic joy.

​I went into the theater tonight expecting a shiny, sterilized, overly-polished CGI mess. You know the type. The kind where they take a classic, weird story, scrub all the dirt out from under its fingernails, make the characters "relatable," and add a soundtrack full of outdated pop songs just to keep toddlers from throwing tantrums in the aisles.

​But... oh my god.

​I’m still shaking a little bit. That was not what happened. Or maybe it was, but in a way that completely bypassed my cynical adult brain and stabbed me right in my childhood soul. I don’t even know where to start typing. My thoughts are overlapping.

​Let me try to breathe. Let me try to put this down before the dream-like haze of the cinema fades and I have to wake up and be a functional human being tomorrow.

​The Smell of Stale Popcorn and the Ghost of 1998

​Before we even talk about the movie itself—can we talk about the atmosphere?

​I bought a ticket for the late-night screening at this crumbling indie theater downtown. The one with the velvet seats that smell like fifty years of spilled soda and damp winter coats. There were maybe seven other people in the entire room. Two teenagers whispering in the back row, an older couple who looked like they got lost on their way to a documentary, and a guy three rows down who slept through the entire first act.

​It was perfect. It felt lonely. It felt like the exact kind of place where Mr. and Mrs. Twit would live if they were turned into a cinema.

​When the lights went down, the screen didn't just light up; it exploded with this dusty, textured, hand-drawn-but-not-quite-hand-drawn aesthetic that made me gasp. It looked like claymation had a baby with a rough oil painting, and then someone dragged the whole thing through a puddle of mud.

​Wait... what was that first shot?

​Right. The fence. That rotting, jagged wooden fence at the bottom of the poster. The movie starts with a slow, agonizing crawl up that fence, and you can see every single splinter. You can see the green mold growing in the cracks. You can almost smell the wet wood. It didn't look like sterile computer graphics. It looked like someone actually built this terrible world out of cardboard and spit and glue, and then brought it to life with some kind of dark magic.

​I think that was the moment I realized I wasn't going to get a clean, safe, modern film. I was going to get something dirty. And thank god for that.

​That Beard. That Horrible, Living Beard.

​If you’ve read the book, you know about the beard. Mr. Twit’s beard is practically a main character. It’s this massive, matted, disgusting bush of hair that he never washes, filled with the decaying remnants of his past meals.

​In the book, it’s funny.

​In The Twits (2025), it is a psychological horror film contained entirely on a man’s chin.

​When Mr. Twit first came on screen—voiced with this gravelly, wheezing, chaotic energy that I’m still trying to process—the camera pushed in so close I actually leaned back in my seat. You could see the individual hairs, stiff with dried gravy. You could see a tiny, shriveled green pea nestled deep near his lip. And then... oh god, the cornflake.

​There’s a shot where he’s talking, and this soggy, pale yellow cornflake is just vibrating in the tangle of his beard, catching the light. I felt this physical wave of nausea, but at the same time, I wanted to climb into the screen and inspect it. It was beautiful in its ugliness. The animators didn’t hold back. They made the grime look tactile.

​But it wasn’t just disgusting for the sake of being disgusting. It felt... real. Like, we all know people who are a little bit "Twit." We all have that messy, dark, unkind corner of our minds, and seeing it rendered with such loving, filthy detail felt like a warm hug from a monster.

​And Mrs. Twit!

​She’s always been the scarier of the two for me. Mr. Twit is just a slob, but Mrs. Twit has this calculating, sharp, jagged malice to her. The way she moves in the movie—she doesn’t walk, she sort of creeps and pivots like a broken puppet. Her long, spindly limbs look like dry twigs that might snap if she bends too fast.

​They did this thing with her glass eye that honestly stayed in my head. In the book, it’s a funny prank when she drops it into his beer mug. But in the film, they play with the reflection through the glass. There’s a scene where Mr. Twit is looking down into his foaming glass of warm, flat ale, and the glass eye is staring back up at him from the bottom. But the way the light hits it, the eye looks like it’s blinking. It looks like it’s alive, trapped under the liquid, judging him.

​The whole theater felt frozen during that shot. Nobody laughed. We were all just... suspended in this weird, grotesque poetry.

​The Worm Spaghetti Scene (Or, How I Almost Threw Up My Cherry Coke)

​I have to talk about the spaghetti scene. I have to. It’s the centerpiece of their mutual hatred.

​Mrs. Twit goes out to find long, slimy earthworms to mix into Mr. Twit’s dinner. We all know the beat. But the way they paced this in the movie was so agonizingly slow. It wasn't played for quick, cartoonish laughs. It was treated like a high-stakes, silent-film suspense sequence.

​You watch her dig them up in the dark, rainy garden. The mud squelching between her dirty fingernails. The worms are these translucent, pale pink things that twist and stretch in her palms.

​Then, the kitchen scene. The sound design here was incredible. No music. Just the bubbling of the pot, the heavy, wet thud of the spaghetti landing on the plate, and the subtle, sickening slide of the worms as she folds them into the tomato sauce.

​When Mr. Twit sits down to eat, the camera stays on his face. He’s shoving these massive, dripping forks of red pasta into his mouth. And you hear it.

Squish. Pop. A tiny, wet crunch.

​"This spaghetti is unusually chewy tonight, my dear," he says, his mouth full of red sauce and beard hair.

​And she just sits there. Smiling. This wide, toothless, terrifying grin. Her real eye is squinted shut, and her glass eye is pointing slightly off to the left, staring at the wall.

​It was so uncomfortable. It went on for too long. But that’s exactly why it worked! Modern movies are so afraid of letting a scene breathe, so afraid of making the audience sit in discomfort. But The Twits (2025) just forces you to watch this awful man eat worms in real-time, and you can’t look away because the lighting is this gorgeous, warm, amber candle-glow that makes the whole nightmare look like a Rembrandt painting.

​It was art. Disgusting, wormy art.

​Wait... Who Are These Kids? (The Awkward Middle Bit)

​Okay, I need to interrupt myself because I can’t just praise this movie blindly. There were things that didn't work. Things that made me sit up and go, "Oh, right. Netflix paid for this."

​If you look at the poster, down at the bottom, there’s a little boy with dark hair looking terrified, and a little girl on the right with a pink scarf looking thoughtful.

​These characters are not in the book.

​In the book, the conflict is purely between the Twits, the Muggle-Wump monkeys, and the Roly-Poly Bird. It’s a tight, insular, fable-like story. But of course, a modern feature film needs "human stakes" and a "relatable emotional anchor" for the kids in the audience.

​So they added these two kids. I think their names were Skye and Chip? Or maybe Luke? Honestly, I’ve already forgotten their names, which tells you everything you need to know about how much they fit into the story.

​They are orphans or runaways or something—it’s never fully explained in a way that makes sense, or maybe I just tuned out during their exposition scene—who live in a hollowed-out tree near the Twits’ garden. They act as the "translators" between the monkeys and the human world.

​Every time the movie cut to these kids, the energy just... dropped.

​It felt like someone had spliced a completely different, much more conventional movie into the middle of this dark, Dahl-esque fever dream. The kids looked too cute. Their designs were too smooth. They didn't have the dirt, the jagged edges, the greasy hair that made Mr. and Mrs. Twit look so spectacular. They looked like they belonged in a Pixar movie, which made their interactions with the grotesque Twits feel incredibly jarring.

​There’s this one scene where the little girl has a heart-to-heart with the lead Muggle-Wump monkey. The monkey is crying because his family is locked in a cage, and she’s holding his little blue hand, talking about "finding where you belong" and "family isn't just who you're born with."

​I actually rolled my eyes. I’m sorry, but I did.

​Roald Dahl was never about cheap, sentimental platitudes. His books worked because they acknowledged that the world is a cruel, absurd, ridiculous place where bad people are ugly and good people are just trying to survive by being clever. Adding this layer of generic, emotional therapy-speak felt like a betrayal of the book's spirit.

​But then... wait.

​Maybe I’m being too harsh?

​Because later in the film, those same kids are the ones who help orchestrate the great sticky-glue escape, and their inclusion does give the monkeys a bit more agency since they have allies. But still. It felt fake. It felt like a corporate mandate. "Insert two relatable children so the toy line has human figures."

​I wish they had just let the monkeys speak for themselves.

​The Muggle-Wumps and the Color Blue

​Let’s talk about the monkeys. The Muggle-Wumps.

​In the original book, they’re just regular monkeys who are forced to stand on their heads all day because Mr. Twit wants to create the Great Upside-Down Monkey Circus.

​In The Twits (2025), they are these vibrant, electric-blue, incredibly expressive creatures. Look at them on the poster—they look like these fuzzy, chaotic little Muppets with glowing pink noses and bright purple ears.

​When they first showed up, I was worried the blue was too bright. It felt like a distraction from the muted, dirty earth tones of the Twits’ house. But as the movie went on, I realized the color contrast was completely intentional.

​The Twits’ world is dead. It’s grey, brown, olive green, and yellow. It’s the color of decay, of old grease, of dust.

​The monkeys are life. They are wild, untamed, vibrant, and blue. They represent the magic and the color that the Twits have tried to squeeze out of the world.

​There is this beautiful, silent sequence where the monkeys are left alone in their cage at night. The moon is shining through the rusted bars, and because they are so bright blue, they practically glow in the dark. They are huddling together, shivering, whispering to each other in this strange, clicking language that doesn’t have subtitles but doesn’t need them. You can hear their tiny, ragged breathing. You can see the condensation of their breath in the cold air.

​It felt so real. It didn't feel like CGI characters; it felt like actual, living, breathing animals that were cold and terrified.

​And then, the Roly-Poly Bird arrives.

​I didn't see that coming at all. I thought they would make the Roly-Poly Bird some kind of comic-relief sidekick who cracks jokes. But instead, she is this majestic, slightly ridiculous, giant tropical bird with feathers that look like spun sugar and gold leaf. When she flies into the frame, she brings this explosion of pink and orange and gold that literally illuminates the dirty backyard.

​The contrast between this beautiful, glowing bird and the muddy, grey, trash-filled yard of the Twits is one of the most visually arresting things I’ve seen in years. It was like a flower growing out of a skull.

​The Philosophy of the Sunbeam

​There’s a quote from the book. It’s the one everyone knows. It’s the one that people get tattooed on their arms, the one that teachers put on classroom walls:

​"If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it. A person who has good thoughts cannot possibly be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely."

​I was so afraid of how the movie would handle this.

​I was terrified they would have a narrator read it in a boring, dramatic voiceover while showing a montage of the kids smiling. Or worse, that they would ignore it entirely.

​But they did something so much more subtle, and so much more devastating.

​Near the end of the second act, there is a moment where Mrs. Twit is sitting at her vanity mirror. The mirror is cracked, dusty, covered in old greasy smudges. She’s trying to brush her hair—this bird's nest of blue-grey fluff—and she stops. She just stares at herself.

​The music swells, but it’s not a happy song. It’s this incredibly lonely, melancholic accordion and violin piece that sounds like a French street musician playing in the rain.

​She looks at her crooked nose. She looks at her glass eye. She looks at her mouth, which is naturally turned down into this bitter, sharp sneer. And for just a fraction of a second... you see a flash of who she could have been.

​The animation does this tiny, almost imperceptible shift. The harsh, yellow light on her face softens. The sharp angles of her cheeks seem to round out just a little bit. It’s like a ghost of her childhood self is trying to break through the crust of her bitterness.

​She tries to smile. A real smile. Not a mean, triumphant sneer, but a gentle, happy smile.

​But she can’t.

​The muscles in her face twitch. Her mouth drops back into the sneer. The ugly thoughts have hardened her. The crust is too thick. She looks away, angry, and smashes the mirror with her hairbrush.

​It was heartbreaking.

​It took this caricature of a villain and made her tragic. It showed that ugliness isn't just something you're born with; it’s a choice you make every single day until you forget how to choose anything else. I didn't expect a silly movie about two mean people playing pranks on each other to make me think about my own bitterness, about the times I’ve chosen anger over kindness, about how my own face might look to the people who love me.

​I was crying in the dark. I was actually wiping tears away with the sleeve of my sweater, hoping the sleeping guy three rows down wouldn't wake up and see me weeping at an animated movie about monkeys.

​The Great Balloon Escape and the Loss of Gravity

​Let’s talk about the climax. The poster shows Mr. and Mrs. Twit floating in the air, held up by this massive bunch of colorful, bright balloons.

​In the book, this is how Mr. Twit tries to get rid of his wife—by tying balloons to her arms to send her floating into the sky, and then she has to bite through the strings to get back down.

​In the movie, they expand this into this grand, surreal, gravity-defying sequence that takes up the entire third act.

​The monkeys have used the sticky glue—the "Hugtight" glue that Mr. Twit uses to catch birds—to paste all of the Twits' furniture to the ceiling. They want to make the Twits think they’ve gone upside down.

​But the movie takes it a step further. The kids and the monkeys somehow manage to attach hundreds of helium-filled balloons to the actual foundations of the house. Or maybe they just attach them to the Twits? Honestly, the physics of it make absolutely no sense, but in the moment, you don’t care.

​The house starts to lift.

​Not like the house in Up. Not clean and majestic.

​This house lifts like a tooth being pulled out of a rotten gum.

​You hear the wood splintering. You hear the pipes snapping, spraying rusty water into the mud. The ground tears open, revealing these thick, black tree roots that cling to the dirt before finally letting go with this massive thump.

​And then, they are in the air.

​Mr. and Mrs. Twit are clinging to the rafters, floating above their neighborhood. The sky is this bruised, violet purple, the sun is just starting to set, casting this long, golden light across the landscape.

​This was the best performance of the movie. The voice actors—whoever they are, I didn't stay for the credits because I wanted to get out into the cold air, but they deserve every award—went from screeching caricatures to these raw, terrified, desperate human beings.

​They are floating. They are losing everything. Their filthy house, their cages, their garden—everything they used to define their cruel little lives is shrinking beneath them.

​And instead of fighting, they just... look at each other.

​There’s this moment where Mr. Twit reaches out his hand. His dirty, hairy hand, with the black fingernails and the dried gravy.

​And Mrs. Twit takes it.

​They don't say anything. They don't apologize. They don't have a sudden realization that they were wrong. They are still the Twits. They are still mean, dirty, horrible people. But they are mean, dirty, horrible people together.

​And as the balloons carry them higher and higher, into the dark, cold clouds, they just hold hands and watch their ugly little world disappear.

​It didn't feel like a kids' movie ending. It felt like an ending to a weird, dark indie film about two people who are too broken for the world, who can only exist in their own shared, toxic orbit.

​The Little Things (Details You Might Miss)

​Since I’m writing this for the internet, and since my brain won't let me sleep until I exhaust every single thought, here are some tiny details I noticed that I haven’t seen anyone else talking about:

• ​The Quentin Blake Lines: If you look closely at the shadows in the film, they aren't solid black. They are made of these tiny, scratching, cross-hatched ink lines that mimic Quentin Blake’s illustration style. Especially around Mr. Twit’s eyes and the corners of Mrs. Twit’s mouth. It’s this incredibly subtle texture that makes the whole film feel like it’s printed on rough paper.
• ​The Bird Pie Ingredients: When Mrs. Twit is preparing the kitchen for the four-and-twenty blackbirds pie, there is a jar on her shelf labeled "Scurvy Grass." That is a direct nod to old pirate remedies, but also just such a Dahl-esque word. There are dozens of jars like that in the background. I want to buy the Blu-ray just to pause the film and read all the labels.
• ​The Sound of the Glass Eye: Every time Mrs. Twit’s glass eye moves or taps against something, there is this tiny, high-pitched clink sound. Like a marble hitting a tile floor. It’s so quiet, but if you’re wearing headphones or sitting in a quiet theater, it crawls right up your spine.
• ​The Soundtrack: The music is incredibly strange. It’s not orchestral, and it’s not pop. It’s this mixture of clinking glass, out-of-tune accordions, rusty saw-playing, and children’s choirs singing in minor keys. It sounds like a carnival that has been left out in the rain for twenty years. I need to find the soundtrack on Spotify immediately, though I’m afraid it will give me nightmares.

​Did the Ending Actually Work?

​I’ve been thinking about this for the last mile of my walk home.

​In the book, the Twits get "the shrinks." They glue themselves to the floor, and because they are upside down, their bodies slowly shrink into their necks, and their necks shrink into their torsos, until there is nothing left of them but two bundles of dirty clothes on the floor.

​It’s a hilarious, grotesque, sudden ending.

​The movie doesn't do that.

​Instead, it leaves them floating. Floating up into the atmosphere, held by those bright, colorful balloons.

​Some people are going to hate that. I know they are. They’re going to say it’s too soft, that it doesn't give the Twits the satisfyingly disgusting punishment they deserve. They’re going to say the movie copped out to make the ending more "poetic."

​But for me?

​It worked. It worked because the punishment isn't physical. The punishment is that they are stuck together, forever, in the cold, silent sky, with nothing but their own ugly thoughts and each other. They are completely cut off from the world they tried so hard to torment.

​And the monkeys?

​The final shot of the film is the Muggle-Wumps. They are finally free. They are standing on their feet—not their heads—in the middle of the ruined, empty yard. The blue color of their fur seems to have spread to the grass. Little blue flowers are starting to bloom in the mud where Mr. Twit’s beard-crumbs used to fall.

​It’s peaceful. It’s quiet.

​The movie doesn't end with a big dance number. It doesn't end with a joke.

​It just fades to black on the sound of the wind blowing through the empty monkey cage, and the distant, faint pop of a balloon in the sky.

​I’m Tired. My Screen is Blurry.

​I should probably go to bed.

​My fingers are stiff, and I have to be at work in five hours. I don’t even know if this review makes sense. It’s too long, it’s too emotional, and I’ve probably read way too much into a movie meant for seven-year-olds.

​But that’s what good stories do, isn’t it? They reach back into your childhood, find the dirt you left behind, and remind you of what it felt like to be afraid of the dark, to laugh at slimy things, to believe that your thoughts could actually change the shape of your face.

​I don’t know if I loved the movie completely… but I know I won’t forget it soon.