The Gullspång Miracle

I liked but didn’t love writer / director Maria Fredriksson’s “The Gullspång Miracle,” an interesting, if eerily familiar, documentary that has shades of both “Catfish” and “Three Identical Strangers.” It’s a fascinating story, but Fredriksson doesn’t do a good job telling it. The end result is a twisty, turny, frustrating film that leaves the viewer with very few answers. It all started with a (supposed) divine premonition that led two sisters to buy an apartment in the tiny Swedish town of Gullspång. When the go to sign the papers, the seller looks absolutely identical to their older sister who died by suicide (supposedly) nearly three decades earlier. As the sisters try to reunite their family and seek answers to how any of this is possible, huge cracks form in each person’s story, and deep, dark secrets are unearthed as everyone’s lives spin out of control. Nothing ever feels legitimate about the sisters, especially when faced with an outsider that they want so desperately to be the sibling they lost 30 years earlier. What started as a positive story turns ugly and downright nasty, and the sisters realize they all have very different lives and upbringings. This is a tale of what happens when you don’t want your family to be your family, and after a series of DNA tests and a deeper investigation into what actually happened, more shocking and strange revelations emerge in a tangled yarn about religion, suicide, murder, and missing persons. The film exposes a web of deceit and lies, and it’s clear someone is not telling the truth here. Eventually, Fredriksson becomes skeptical and asserts that she feels she’s being duped and that someone is lying, but who? The director annoyingly inserts herself into the movie, which really puts a damper on the storytelling. From the opening scene, the documentary feels like a staged set-up. The story is extremely complicated and difficult to follow, and Fredriksson isn’t equipped to handle all the labyrinthine qualities of the narrative. “The Gullspång Miracle” is a story that I won’t soon forget, but the film offers zero resolution. Despite this major letdown, it’s still one of the more interesting documentaries in years.

I’ve seen quite a few Scandinavian documentaries where I do end up at the end wondering if any of it was actually true? This tells of a mystery that started with the birth of twins in 1941. Not that either twin born at the time knew of the other, indeed that only happened after two sisters - Kari and May - realised that they had the same still life on their wall and that one of them felt drawn to town of Gullspång for some inexplicable, possibly divine, reason. After a slight accident caused her to have to remain in the place, she started to look for a house. No houses but inspecting an apartment, guess what was on the wall? Yep! Kismet! What's more the seller was the spitting image of their late sister. Anyway, she buys the apartment and that is the start of a series of revelations that test what they think they know about their family; their suicide-victim sister Astrid and her enigmatic double Olaug and a combination of the sceptical, the religious and the downright mysterious. It also manages to test the voracity of the hitherto infallible DNA test; the competence of the police force and the patience of just about everyone in or watching this. Being born a twin in Nazi occupied Norway during the war was a dangerous business, so there is some plausibility to them being separated at birth, but the question of what happened thereafter is mired in conflicting information and that search makes for the bedrock of this frequently quite confusing and contradictory piece of film making. My big question? Well whom, exactly, is Olaug and is she to be trusted? I must say I didn’t like her very much but then again, I didn’t really like many of these folks whose gullibility, and perhaps religiosity, made me at times wonder what century we were in. When Astrid ("Lita") died, under curiously under-investigated circumstances, she left three insurance policies? What happened to the payouts? Might the beneficiary be caught up in this familial intrigue? Could she really have been murdered? If you are looking for a conclusion then wish away because director Maria Fredriksson has no intention of neatly rounding this off for us. We are left with almost as many questions at the end as we started off with, more even, but along the way it does have something oddly compelling about it. It is the kind of story you couldn’t make up. Or could you?