Horror Movie Review: Tin & Tina (2023)

Tin & Tina is a Spanish psychological horror-thriller film directed by Rubin Stein, releasing in 2023.

In the early 1980s in Spain, a pregnant Lola marries Adolfo. During their wedding, Lola suffers a miscarriage and is told she cannot have children again, plunging her into depression. Adolfo talks Lola into adopting children from the convent orphanage nearby. The two end up adopting Tin and Tina, albino twins of an older age than the couple originally planned to adopt. The twins share a gift for music and particularly strong religious beliefs that somewhat unnerve Lola. Although Lola and Adolfo are not religious, they pretend to be to make the twins happy.

However, soon enough, the twins’ odd religious beliefs begin to disturb Lola. They play strange biblical games that are practically lethal. Lola’s dog bites her and then the twins kill it to ‘cleanse its soul’ without realizing it won’t come back to life afterward. When the twins receive their first communion, a classmate of theirs who bullied them falls into a coma, and Lola suspects that the twins were behind it. Lola eventually learns that the boy is dead. However, Adolfo refuses to believe her and does not seem too worried about the twins’ behaviour.

Lola faints on New Year’s Eve and finds out that she is pregnant, much to her shock and horror. The twins become overexcited about having a little sibling, and Lola grows more distant from them. One evening, Tin and Tina tie Lola up and attempt to inject her with a potentially poison-filled syringe to ‘feed the baby’. Lola raises a knife to defend herself, much to the shock of Adolfo; her water breaks at that time, and after Lola gives birth the twins share enthusiastically that they want the baby to be baptized. When Lola refuses, the children nearly drown the baby by trying to baptize him themselves, and Adolfo burns their Bible…..

Check out Tin & Tina to see what transpires next.

I’m so sorry Lola & Adolfo but you’ve got to be up there as a pair of the dumbest characters in horror movie history. This duo make bad decision after bad decision it’s genuinely almost impossible to defend them. Say what you will about Tin & Tina but at the end of the day they’re kids and for the most part come across like they truly don’t understand why the things that they do are wrong. They clearly need to be more closely monitored by two parents who actually give a crap but Lola & Adolfo come across as far too lazy for the task at hand.

In a lot of ways this movie is a good advertisement as to why adoption agencies go through such rigorous checks before allowing adoptions.

One aspect that the film nails is the sense of paranoia it creates for Lola and thus the viewer. There’s a sense of ambiguity surrounding the twins that’s enjoyable to dissect. Ultimately, there’s a few different ways to interpret their actions which is fun to debate. Of course, there’s the obvious commentary about religious fundamentalism as well.

There’s a number of harrowing scenes. The one involving Tin & Tina “baptizing” the new baby is particularly intense and hard to watch.

Visually, Tin & Tina absolutely knocks it out of the park. Firstly, there’s the striking appearances of Tin & Tina themselves. Otherwise, the film has a really delightful colour palette and there’s even some nice looking gore and effects. There’s a scene near the end involving an electrocution that looks absolutely fantastic.

Overall, Tin & Tina is a different type of horror film. You might go into expecting the obvious but it does at least deliver something unique feeling. It makes you think and question a lot of what happens which is no bad thing. I say check it out on Netflix and see what you think really happened. For reference, I watched the film with the English dub and found it perfectly fine.