(Trigger warning: suicide, depression)

I watched "The Skeleton Twins" months ago, but it’s a film that has stayed with me and will probably continue to stay with me for years. I sometimes easily forget movies that are so set on being sad and “real” that they become a different universe, where everything goes wrong and the world is a specialized hell for our protagonist. Some of the best “real” movies I’ve seen don’t make the outside world hell, they make hell the inside of the character. It’s often easier to fight a dragon than your own personal demons, and "The Skeleton Twins" is a perfect example of a film that tackles personal issues within a normal world.

The films opens with Milo Dean (Bill Hader), an aspiring actor in California, slitting his wrists, and his sister Maggie (Kristen Wiig), in New York, about to swallow handful of pills when she receives a call from the hospital about her brother. Even after a decade of not talking, the twins are eerily in sync. These first scenes introduce the dark cloud of pain and suffering that hovers over the whole movie. Make no mistake, there are happy, funny and sincere scenes that could easily be put in a comedy film, but the cloud is always there. And that’s what makes this movie great.

Maggie invites Milo to come stay with her and her kinda-doofy husband Lance (Luke Wilson) in their hometown. Milo reconnects with his old English teacher Rich (Ty Burrell) who seduced Milo when he was in high school. Meanwhile, Maggie is sleeping with her scuba instructor, and secretly taking birth control because Lance wants a baby and she does not.

They become each others' support systems but the journey is full of anger and betrayal, since neither are strong enough to battle their demons on their own.

This movie deals with a lot of heavy topics ranging from suicide and depression to infidelity and even molestation. The genius of the movie is not that it covers these topics, but that it covers them as individual parts of life as opposed to the whole. Maggie and Milo are not happy.

We know this from the very beginning. But they are not always un-happy either. And this is where Wiig and Hader truly shine. Saturday Night Live established them both as famously funny actors, and this movie proves they can play dark comedy as effortlessly as they can play slapstick. The twins get high together, do an incredible lip sync to “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”, and play off each other so seamlessly that for a second you forget they’re not actually siblings.

These moments of laughter and genuinely lovable characters make their fights and flaws all the more harsh.

Maggie and Milo’s dynamic help the audience grapple with the big questions that are posed throughout the film.

When Milo gives Lance hints that Maggie is taking birth control, she confronts him, and claims that he ruined her marriage. She’s right. Milo retorts that her infidelity and secrecy ruined the marriage, and that her unhealthy relationship was going to blow up eventually. He’s also right.

This isn’t a situation that has a clear conflict and resolution, and that same dark cloud of their own mental and emotional instability hangs over the scene until it becomes what is arguably the darkest, cruelest moment of the entire film. And because we are rooting for both of them, we feel double the amount of pain when they’re both hurt.

It’s not a movie where we want them to win the grand championship, get the dream job or marry the perfect partner. We just want them to be okay.

This movie lowers your defenses and then strikes you with harder truths than you’re prepared for. It’s an all-too-real kind of intimacy, and that’s why it matters.