SUPERPOSITION Trailer | RIGA IFF 2023

SUPERPOSITION
Directed by: Karoline Lyngbye
DK, 2023

Stine and Teit would describe themselves as middle-class. As artists and intellectuals, they both yearn to assert their individuality. Leaving the urban and, to them, predictable environment of Copenhagen, the family moves to a woodland in Sweden. Here, the ordinary becomes extraordinary: suddenly, their son Nemo no longer recognises his mother. Soon the couple are confronted by neighbours who look exactly like… them. Meanwhile, the mysterious forest draws closer around them.

Reflections, distorted mirrors, and contemplations are the aesthetic terminology used in this gothic doppelganger thriller. In a sense, director Karoline Lyngbye uses the model of the middle class in her first feature-length film to attempt to resolve, in a Walter Benjamin-esque wave of self-esteem, the relationship between original and dupe: what if it cannot be resolved — are we copies of copies, even though we try to convince ourselves otherwise? What if either of this films’ thematic twins, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and Peele’s Us (2019), are merely copies of copies too? The quantum physics term used in the title allows us to look at the two protagonists as entering into a unified system, a kind of world through the looking glass that reproduces itself.