GFF22: Superior

Erin Vassilopoulos’ Hitchcockian twin-swap noir is more Psycho than The Parent Trap.

Superior begins as bloodied Marian (Alessandra Mesa) labours along a dimly lit road, her red boiler suit matching the oozing gash on her forehead. As the sound of a rumbling engine intensifies, the car headlights visible over her shoulder begin to get bigger as a vehicle approaches. Terrified woman and ominous muscle car travel side-by-side for a short moment before the vehicle knocks Marian to the side of the road. A tall, pale figure exits the vehicle as the streetlamp light bounces off his slick hair and even slicker leather jacket. Making his way to the back of the car, he inspects his boiler-suited victim and opens the boot. Before he has a chance to react, Marian has clambered into the driver’s seat and turned on the ignition. Her stalker has now inherited the role of deer in literal headlights and Marian presses her foot to the floor; the car speeds off, crushing him as it passes. That stalker should really have remembered to take his keys out of the ignition.

Sometime after her horrifying ordeal, Marian has cleaned herself up and arrives at the home of her twin sister, Vivian (Ani Mesa). Vivian still lives in the sisters’ hometown – which Marian left to pursue a career in music – and is shocked to see her twin (‘I haven’t seen you in six years’). Vivian lives in a well-kept home with husband Michael (Jake Hoffman, son of Dustin and familiar face from his cameo as Steve Madden in The Wolf of Wall Street), and we quickly learn of the twin’s contrasting personalities; Marian is free-wheeling and laidback while Vivian is uptight, serious, and regimented, with the walls of her home sporting a calendar that schedules her sex with Michael and display shelves adorned with his antique tobacco tin collection. It’s a notable change of pace for Marian.

A condition of staying in Vivian’s home is that Marian needs to find a job to pay her share of the household bills, so she takes a job in an ice cream store. After one shift working alongside the store’s young manager, Miles (Stanley Simons), Marian desperately pleads with Vivian to secretly take her place and work her shift in order to let her stay at home and focus on her music. Vivian reluctantly agrees; this might normally be where you would say something like ‘and then chaos ensues’.

While Marian is at home posing as Vivian, a police officer arrives to ask Vivian (Marian) whether she has heard from her sister (Vivian), because they have found an abandoned car that they believe belongs to her (Marian) boyfriend, Robert, who is recovering in a nearby hospital having been badly injured in some sort of car accident. Oh dear. So the leather-clad slick Rick from before was her crazy boyfriend, and he isn’t dead? That’s far from ideal. As Marian deals with this news, Vivian is actually enjoying life in a dead-end job without the same kind of responsibility she usually deals with at home. She feels a satisfying release from the suburban day-to-day life that she had been living up until Marian’s return to her life. 

With Marian’s estranged ex-psychopath (Pico Alexander) back in town with a taste for revenge, Vivian’s stint moonlighting as her twin inevitably gets her wrapped up in the perilous situation. As Superior creeps towards a conclusion, the sisters need to use all their cunning and an unconventional repellent lifted straight from Hitchcock’s Rear Window to ward off their attacker, but are two heads really better than one?

Despite a shared 1980s setting and both featuring a nod to a small-town celebration of Halloween, Superior comes from a different universe than the bubblegum-tinged Netflix sensation Stranger Things. An obvious inspiration is the eerie surrealism of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, but the mysterious aesthetic of Superior feels like it has been plucked from a paint-by-numbers guide to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Director Erin Vassilopolous utilises a lot of the tropes that feature in Kubrick’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel; the set design’s use of colour, the droning synths of composer Jessica Moss’ score, the use of slow zooms, the fixed and distance camera placement that gives the effect that you are watching people in a dollhouse, but the Overlook Hotel is swapped for small-town suburbia.

Superior is Vassilopoulos’ first feature film, having previously directed music videos for the likes of New York post-punks Parquet Courts and several short films. Superior itself started as a short and was part of the 2015 Berlin Film Festival’s short film selection, before Vassilopoulos developed the same story into a full-length feature. Her entire body of work to date is told through from a grainy, richly-coloured, minimalistic viewpoint, and it’s the fully realised vision of Superior’s 80s-set production design that feels like its most impressive achievement. Think of Tim Burton’s version of suburbia in Edward Scissorhands and you’ll be some way towards picturing the aesthetic of Superior.

Real-life (well, obviously) twins Alessandra and Ani Mesa convincingly nail each of their respective characters’ contrasting personalities, but there does appear to be an almost-intentional pause between the delivery of each line, a strangely lingering wooden sensation that is present as they converse on screen. Maybe it’s another link to The Shining. Remember the weird, wink-wink acting of Scatman Crothers or Overlook Hotel manager Barry Nelson as they show the Torrance family around at the beginning? That was a bit dodgy too, and that was Kubrick.

Superior doesn’t rely on - or have the same amount of fun with - the common tropes and clichés that might normally be associated with the classic film genre of body or identity swapping. Rather than fooling parents (d’oh!), swapping classes (you guys!), or hooking up with your sister’s boyfriend (Marian!), Vassilopolous uses the identity swap as a way to explore how each twin uses the identity swap as a form of escapism. Vivian escapes from the monotony of suburban life by acting as the free-spirited Marian, while Marian literally uses the switch to try and escape from her shady past. The film reminds you of that one thing you always daydreamed about as a kid; having an identical twin that would let you escape your stuffy home life to smoke weed outside an ice cream shop, while your sibling can successfully evade the police and a psychotic stalker boyfriend. The dream.