A troubled young couple take a hazardous detour off grid, literally and metaphorically, in Danish director Karoline Lyngbye’s highly assured debut feature Superposition. A twist-heavy thriller that flirts with familiar psycho-horror tropes while still treating its audience like intelligent adults, this mind-bending exercise in Nordic Noir makes its festival debut in Rotterdam this week, with domestic theatrical release scheduled for March. Positive festival reviews, fan-friendly genre elements and superior Scandi production values should all boost its international prospects.
Superposition initially shapes up like a pretty straight backwoods horror plot, albeit clothed in more high-calibre visuals than usual. Arty Copenhagen thirtysomethings Stine (Marie Bach Hansen) and Teit (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard), together with their young son Nemo (Mihlo Olsen), arrive at a deluxe lakeside holiday cabin in a remote corner of Sweden to begin a year-long hibernation project disconnected from phone, internet or neighbours. Writer Stine plans to use this hardcore retreat to finish her debut novel while Teit is turning their lifestyle experiment into a weekly podcast, posting the USB files back to Denmark from a nearby rural mailbox.
Teit views these confessional interviews as an opportunity for raw, soul-searching therapy sessions with his wife. Stine is less convinced, calling their getaway “spoiled escapism” and the podcast “the most narcissistic premise ever”. Her mockery is affectionate, but edged with a bitterness that deepens with each passing day. It soon emerges that Stine is still wounded by Teit’s historic infidelity, which helps explain the pair’s current emotional and sexual estrangement, and also their attempts to rekindle the relationship in this radical new setting.
Just when it appears to be preparing a scalding critique of smug bourgeois privilege in the tradition of Ruben Östlund or Michael Haneke, Superposition takes a disorienting metaphysical left turn. Stine and Teit become aware of other people staying on the other side of the lake, despite assurances from the cabin owner of their total isolation. After a suspenseful build-up of creepy near-misses, plus a genuinely nerve-jangling scene in which Nemo goes missing (and credit to Lyngbye here for resisting the temptation to add a “finding Nemo” joke), the couple experience a shock revelation: the strangers across the water are their exact doppelgängers, with the same lives and marital tensions. When the four finally meet, confusion and violence is their first reaction. A wary truce follows, then a head-scratching collective attempt to understand this bizarre rupture in the fabric of space-time.
Borrowed from physics, the term “superposition” describes the ability of a quantum system to exist in multiple states simultaneously. Lyngbye’s self-aware characters refer to this concept while puzzling over whether they may be trapped in an overlap between parallel universes. But they also kick around other possible scenarios: are they in Hell? Suffering from psychotic delusions? Victims of a bizarre body-snatching takeover plot?
Lyngbye never commits to a full explanation for all this double trouble, allowing it to breathe as allegory, but she and her co-writer Mikkel Bak Sørensen still do an admirably thorough job of exploring the wild mix of reactions that might occur on meeting exact clones of yourself and your life partner: a heady churn of existential threat, deep emotional connection and unsettling erotic attraction. Can sex with a more sympathetic version of your spouse even be considered adultery? Superposition puts a subversive new spin on the concept of wife-swapping.
Of course, this is not the first film to exploit the uncanny power of doppelgängers from parallel dimensions: Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Polanski’s The Tenant (1976), David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), James Ward Byrkit’s Coherence (2013), Dennis Villeneuve’s Enemy (2013), Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) and dozens more have played with this timeless literary device, with varying degrees of success. But Superposition finds a fresh angle on these well-worn tropes, chiefly by using the mirror-self idea to interrogate the unspoken cold war between long-term couples: a toxic psychodrama of martyrdom, moral superiority, old scars and festering resentment. Lyngbe also has darkly comic fun with the notion that we may need to kill off our old selves in order to grow as people. Literally, sometimes.
Superposition is a stylish, satisfying debut. The dialogue is unusually sharp for a genre-adjacent film, more like a crisply written stage play than a jump-scare shocker. Punchy performances, an eye-pleasing autumnal colour scheme, and expertly finessed visual effects featuring twin versions of the same character are all strong selling points. Sine Brooker’s cinematography is glossy and sumptuous too, even if the recurring mirror motifs becomes a little blatant. Some viewers may also pick holes in the plot’s bumpy inner logic, especially the casually brutal finale, which feels engineered purely to push the protagonists to homicidal extremes. But overall Lyngbe delivers a smart, compelling and consistently surprising trip through the looking glass.
Director: Karoline Lyngbye
Screenwriters: Mikkel Bak Sørensen, Karoline Lyngbye
Cast: Marie Bach Hansen, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, Mihlo Olsen
Cinematography: Sine Brooker
Editing: Jakob Juul Toldam
Producer:Amalie Lyngbo Quist
Production company: Beo Starling (Denmark)
World sales: Trust Nordisk
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Limelight)
In Danish
105 minutes
