Alternative title(s): Migi to Dali
Manga adaptation by GEEKTOYS
Streaming on Crunchyroll

Premise

Looking to adopt a child, Mr and Mrs Sonoyama are drawn to the seemingly angelic Hitori, who by all appearances is the perfect son. However, Hitori has a dark secret – he’s actually two boys, the twins Migi and Dali, who are deliberately manipulating the Sonoyamas for an unknown purpose.

Zigg’s verdict: Am I My Brother’s Keeper?

This show is very weird. I *think* that’s a compliment though? It’s pretty hard to pin down what Migi & Dali wants to be from this first episode, and while that’s very intriguing and mostly entertaining, there are some undercurrents of a show which seems torn between two different ideas of what it could turn into.

To begin with it’s worth noting that this is based on a manga by the late Nami Sano, creator of the slight but amusing Haven’t You Heard? I’m Sakamoto. That story was mostly a series of fun goofs based around the idea of an impossibly perfect high schooler, so a shift into dark domestic horror was not exactly predictable. You can definitely see the connection though, taking the idea of someone impossibly perfect and this time playing it for drama rather than for laughs.

Except…most of this first episode is still a comedy. There’s definitely an ongoing air of menace around the boys, along with the standard ‘creepy twins’ tropes, but the substance of the episode is largely an increasingly silly series of gags about how they’re coming up with bizarre schemes to gaslight their unwitting foster parents. In this sense it’s actually very similar to Sakamoto, down to the ludicrously improbable levels of preparation and co-ordination the twins are able to employ to make their tricks work.

The thing is, this odd mash-up of horror and comedy actually works pretty well at making the jokes funnier than they would otherwise be, juxtaposed against the otherwise forboeding presentation. The flipside of this though is that the comedy largely negates any serious sense of menace, leaving only those standard trappings to hold up the horror end of the bargain. The show feels stretched between its two extremes as a result – are we meant to be taking these seemingly murderous twins seriously, or should we be dismissing them as being as wacky as the rest of the stuff happening? The tension between the two makes the show fascinating to watch from a metatextual point of view, but I do think that it’ll be really difficult to keep the balance going without one half just fizzling out completely. Still, I’m pretty interested to see them try.