Louisa Moore - Screen Zealots

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.