In Superior, a psychological drama set in a small snowy town in the fall of 1987, two identical twin sisters pretend to be each other. Their identity swap is not all-consuming and nefarious; this is not a Lynchian descent into the tortured psychology of a double, but there’s still something illicit and mischievous about living as someone else, who looks just like you but whose life offers a variety of enticing possibilities. Vivian (Ani Mesa) lives a stultified life as a housewife in a passionless marriage, where their attempts at conceiving a child feel overly ordered and mannered (“We’re supposed to have sex tonight. It’s on the calendar,” her husband flatly informs her).
When her drifter musician sister, Marian (Alessandra Mesa), turns up on her door, Vivian’s initial resistance to trading lives soon morphs into an experience she finds titillating and liberating. Marian’s motivation is more urgent; we meet her running away from an aggressive, menacing lover, and she wants to evade attention from the police and her partner.
Superior’s exploration of blurred identities is a gentle, patient one. Stylistically and thematically, it mirrors the work of Brian De Palma and John Paizs of the Winnipeg Film Group; the visual style feels decades old, with sharp transitions between contrasting images, hard audio cuts and dynamic framing. But there’s also a knowing playfulness to the characterisation and plotting. When Marian proposes trading places with Vivian, initially just for a day, Vivian agrees because of a newfound kinship she feels with her estranged sister, not because of any intense pressure gripping them. While this results in a confusing lack of narrative thrust throughout chunks of the film, it gives both characters the airspace to settle themselves into the peculiar pleasures of living another life.
They explore with curiosity how comfortable they are living as someone else, first as they mimic their adopted identity, before allowing more of their true personality to shine through. Vivian takes Marian’s dreary ice cream parlour job as a welcome relief from her ordered home life, whilst Marian’s outward abrasiveness is allowed to hide behind the neat, secure facade of a suburban home. This leads to our two characters’ identities shifting into a unique blending of the true self and the performance, as the merging of the two personas reveals something previously they never knew about themselves.
Superior has enough thematically to chew over in the quiet hours after watching it, but it does feel lacking in its dramatic construction. While the distant, crisp visual style compliments the stilted marriage of Vivian and Michael, it’s less suited to the darkness and danger Marian is running away from. When friction appears between the sisters, their sparring rarely is that intense, and your imagination inevitably wanders to alternative plotting where they were more actively malicious in ruining the life of the person they’re imitating.
But the tender, at times sweet, way the sisters experience the other’s life is a rewarding, novel approach. For every rogue element that feels underdeveloped (like a suspicious conch shell), there’s an understated, disconcerting choice (you’ll definitely suspect some undisclosed switching is going on). Superior is a film where an exploration of the self results in a newfound, tangible appreciation for sisterhood, where using your sibling’s identity for safety means your double has opened themselves up to danger by living as you. To save both, two fractured halves are required to become whole. The title implies a struggle of dominance where one person comes out on top, but as the narrative develops you realise the story is one of symbiosis – and a stylish, thoughtful one at that.
