#‘The Gullspang Miracle’ Review: Bloodline Mysteries Meet True Crime in a Riveting Scandi Doc

The amusement park water ride that figures in the introductory minutes of The Gullspang Miracle doesn’t begin to suggest the wild emotional roller coaster that the film is about to unfurl. Contacted by two 60-something sisters who had made a thrilling discovery — an older sibling, someone whose existence they’d never suspected — director Maria Fredriksson became a confidant to all three women as well as the chronicler of their seesawing attitudes toward the unexpected kinship. The resulting work, her first feature-length documentary, is an astounding and cleverly structured exploration of serendipity, faith, social divisions, family ties and personal identity. It delves into some of the same themes that made Three Identical Strangers such compelling viewing, but its canvas is one-of-a-kind, a vigorous mix that also encompasses a haunting unsolved crime, complete with Lynchian echoes of Twin Peaks.

Fredriksson doesn’t hide her role in the telling of this complex story. The film begins with her directing sisters May and Kari as they enter a spanking white kitchen in Gullspang, Sweden, to describe for the camera the epiphany they experienced in that very room. They do several takes, Fredriksson encouraging them to be more “technical,” less actorly. They’re happy to comply, the story they’re telling charged with delight and amazement. For a while at least.

The event they’re recalling revolves, strangely enough, around a framed needlepoint. Recovering from a water-ride injury during her visit to Kari in Sweden, May took on a mission to fill the downtime before she could return home to Norway: She went real estate shopping. But her main goal was to find a particular type of still life to hang in whatever home she found. Walking into the kitchen of an apartment for sale in Gullspang, she saw what she’d been looking for, in all its gobsmacking glory. Most people would have seen a standard-issue still life of fruit. For May, that wall hanging was an answered prayer. Kari, noting that it was the central element in a triptych of decorative pieces, saw a sign of the Christian Trinity, a blessing.

Then they met the woman selling the apartment, and the miracle deepened: Olaug was the spitting image of their sister Astrid, known to all as Lita, who died by suicide in 1988. Some genealogical research and a DNA test later, and Olaug was welcomed into the fold as the half-sister May and Kari didn’t know they had, the separated-at-birth twin of their beloved Lita.

If Three Identical Strangers gazes head-on at the wanton cruelty of scientific experimentation, The Gullspang Miracle acknowledges the fallout of evading it. In 1941, when Lita and Olaug were born in occupied Norway, cautious parents and midwives knew that twins were a problem that had to be hidden — or sent their separate ways — because of the Nazis’ gruesome fixation on them as raw material for medical experiments. That angle alone would make this story fascinating. But there are many more angles to come, some of them unusually lacerating.

Tracing the branches of the family tree isn’t Fredriksson’s concern. The marriages of the three women’s father, for example, are never spelled out, and in the present tense, beyond a few mentions of husbands and exes, the film maintains a laser focus on the siblings. That group soon widens to include Kari and May’s brother, Arnt, and their sister Solveig. Olaug also meets with Lita’s daughter, and with the nanny who cared for infant Lita while her parents tended to their harvest.

In the early, heady days of the ground-shaking revelation, Olaug, who never knew she was a twin, describes her lifelong sense that something was missing — the primal pang of a twin torn from her sister? Kari recalls that Lita confided her own deep, vague feelings of loss. Thirty-year-old home movies of Lita reveal an undeniable resemblance between her and Olaug, who eagerly points out their physical similarities to the filmmakers and, in her home stuffed with tchotchkes and antiques, finds a place of honor to hang a photo of her newly discovered sibling. Another photo of Lita, a formal portrait, is on display in Kari’s home in a kind of shrine, and when Pia Lehto’s nimble camera zeros in on it, it’s an eerie reminder of the portrait of Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer — who, like Lita, was found dead at the edge of a lake.

Olaug doesn’t just question the suicide story — she seeks answers from the police, whose autopsy report, it turns out, was never shared with the family. And though the findings are a source of comfort for May, Kari, Arnt and Solveig, a schism that has been buckling the awkward surface cracks it wide open with Olaug’s continued questioning and her insistence that Lita was murdered. Her investigations, and those of Fredriksson, are enlightening as well as unsettling, and eventually they break through layers of resistance to touch hearts and minds. It’s the differences in class and temperament that prove far harder to bridge.

Kari and May’s rapture gives way to hurt and resentment, and it’s increasingly clear that Olaug, after the initial excitement of connection, is holding them and the entire situation at arm’s length. Arty, elegant and citified in her asymmetrical haircut and one dangling earring, she starts off unsure “how to find my place among these people” — people whose lives are steeped in small-town tradition and religion. By the time she makes a return visit to Arnt’s farm to clear the air with him and the sisters, that air is thick with wariness.

Olaug, who grew up in a well-to-do household on the other side of the fjord from May and Kari and their farmer parents, speaks condescendingly, and inaccurately, of their childhood “poverty” and “misery.” In interviews for the camera, her struggle to get her mind around the disrupting idea of a whole new family at 80 is understandable, but her expressions of superiority become more and more bizarre, with pointed mentions of her IQ and her military know-how. A nonbeliever, Olaug is particularly furious that her half-siblings want to convert her — an accusation for which the film offers no evidence.

It’s impossible to see any ill will when the extended family sings a brief, joyful song of thanks to Jesus before a meal. But if that song and everything it represents to a visiting relative is unforgivably offensive, that would be for her to sort out — as Olaug apparently does, in jaw-dropping fashion. “Is someone lying?” Fredriksson demands, from behind the camera, when a crucial reversal is revealed. She adds, exasperated and giving voice to the audience’s thoughts, “What is going on?!” Answers are another matter. But the way things unfold, it’s impossible not to draw parallels to the inflexible us-vs.-them social climate in the States, or to be reminded that urbane sophistication is hardly the opposite of narrow-mindedness.

All of this — the joy, the heaviness, the strained interactions, private confessions and sit-down interviews — is captured with gripping intimacy by Fredriksson and her small team of collaborators. From the sun-washed symmetrical compositions in the film’s early going to the painterly views of winter woods near the scene of a young woman’s mysterious death, Lehto’s affecting cinematography achieves a subtle intensity. Editors Mark Bukdahl and Orvar Anklew shape the scenes with a pulsing, keen sensitivity, the stirring score by Jonas Colstrup (Jehane Noujaim’s The Square) at one with the swirl of emotion, suspense and shifting allegiances.

“This film was supposed to be something positive,” the openhearted Kari says, in wounded complaint, in a voicemail to Fredriksson as the twists reach new levels of the strange and wrenching. The Gullspang Miracle does not follow the cheery celebratory road Kari and May envisioned, but “positive” is in the eye of the beholder. It’s a stupendous film, alive with detail, profound and resonant. From beginning to end (a final-credits punchline of sorts), it’s an illuminating exploration of not just how we tell the stories we tell, but also of how we choose what to believe — sometimes in spite of all that’s before us, or how much of it we’ve been denied.