Superior – first-look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Supe­ri­or – first-look review

31 Jan 2021

Words by Brianna Zigler

Two women in red dresses, one sitting at a vanity mirror applying makeup.
Two women in red dresses, one sitting at a vanity mirror applying makeup.
Famil­iar the­mat­ic ele­ments come togeth­er in Erin Vas­silopou­los’ riff on the dop­pel­gänger genre.

In her fea­ture direc­to­r­i­al debut, Sun­dance alum Erin Vas­silopou­los returns with a con­tin­u­a­tion of her 2015 short film of the same name. Supe­ri­or is pro­pelled by a heinous crime that prompts way­ward musi­cian Mar­i­an (Alessan­dra Mesa) to seek refuge from ret­ri­bu­tion in her home­town, at the house of her estranged twin sis­ter Vivian (Ani Mesa, real-life twin to Alessandra).

Mar­i­an ten­ta­tive­ly recon­nects with her sis­ter after six long years as Vivian, now a stay-at-home wife, tries to con­ceive with her neb­bish hus­band Michael (Jake Hoff­man). With the dop­pel­gänger theme at play from the jump – Mar­i­an ini­tial­ly sports a red jump­suit all too evoca­tive of the ones worn by the Teth­ereds in Jor­dan Peele’s Us – the sis­ters’ iden­ti­ties slow­ly begin to blend into one anoth­er. Yet the famil­iar iden­ti­ty swap nar­ra­tive does lit­tle to expand upon a tried and true motif.

After set­ting up camp at Vivian’s, Mar­i­an assures her sis­ter that her absence is sim­ply a result of her demand­ing life as a trav­el­ling musi­cian, claim­ing that she’s been all over” and just recent­ly returned from a stint in Paris. While Vivian is skep­ti­cal that Paris would lead Marian’s band to her podunk home­town, she is nonethe­less hap­py to final­ly spend time with her sis­ter – although her pres­ence proves a strain on Vivan’s already fal­ter­ing marriage.

When Michael final­ly demands that Mar­i­an pull her weight to stay for an extend­ed peri­od of time, Mar­i­an takes a job at the local ice cream par­lour. But after her first day of work, Mar­i­an con­vinces Vivian to switch places with her for just one day so that she can spend time on her music. Now sport­ing iden­ti­cal hair­cuts (Mar­i­an already hav­ing swapped her blond do for the brunette hues of her sis­ter), the twins quick­ly grow accus­tomed to each other’s lives, and a sin­gle day of Vivian serv­ing scoops turns into several.

Inevitably, Vivian enjoys the sim­plic­i­ty of a food ser­vice job, free of her house­hold and sex­u­al respon­si­bil­i­ties to Michael, while Mar­i­an finds peace in the plant-tend­ing quaint­ness of domes­tic­i­ty. And, also inevitably, the dif­fi­cul­ty in dis­cern­ing who’s who grows stronger as the film push­es for­ward, bla­tant­ly fore­shad­owed ear­ly-on by a sequence where the sis­ters can’t remem­ber which one of them accrued a welt on their fore­head as a child.

The film’s short­com­ings can most­ly be attrib­uted to its pre­dictabil­i­ty. Engag­ing per­for­mances from the Mesa sis­ters and retro-inspired pro­duc­tion design – for a film whose time peri­od is unplace­able – can’t quite save the trans­paren­cy of the plot. The dop­pel­gänger nar­ra­tive has been pop­u­larised across film and tele­vi­sion by every­thing from the afore­men­tioned Us, to the works of David Lynch, David Cro­nen­berg, Char­lie Kauf­man, and even Adam San­dler, and Supe­ri­or is nei­ther an incom­pe­tent­ly exe­cut­ed nor insight­ful addi­tion to the genre.

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