The “truth is stranger than fiction” documentary is almost a movie genre unto itself, though its appeal is mostly ironic: no self-respecting novelist would ever countenance a story this outrageous or unbelievable. This Swedish film, the first feature-length doc by Maria Fredriksson, qualifies for the genre but in a back-assward way. It’s the entire making of the film that buggers belief. In fact, at one point, when the revelations become too much, the director herself can be heard in the background demanding in a conspicuously exasperated tone that her subjects “stop lying” and address her doubts about what they are trying to put across. In that regard, maybe the movie is its own genre: “untruth is stranger than both fiction and real life.”

Fredriksson did not initiate the project. She was asked to record the “miracle” that two sisters in their 60s had recently experienced, thinking that it would make a great movie. It started when one of the sisters, May-Elin Storslettin, who lives in Norway, visits the other, Kari Klo, who lives in the town of Gullspång, Sweden, and is badly injured during a mishap at an amusement park. Told by a physician that she should not travel, May lays up at Kari’s for a few weeks and then impulsively decides to buy an apartment in the town. She chooses a unit because of a still-life on the kitchen wall—a painting that both sisters think is some kind of omen—and when she and Kari meet the owner of the apartment, they are struck by how much she resembles their older sister Lita, who committed suicide 30 years earlier. Initially they wonder if the woman, a retired Swedish army lieutenant named Olaug Bakkevoll, isn’t actually Lita, since they never saw Lita’s body as the funeral was carried out with a closed casket due to religious proscriptions against suicide. Long story short, after some dodgy geneological research carried out by an over-eager cousin and a DNA test showing that Olaug is the sisters’ half-sibling (same father, different mother), they determine that Olaug is Lita’s twin, but because they were born in 1941 during the Nazi occupation, their father decided to give Olaug away to a family “living on the other side of the fjord,” since it was known that the Nazis were carrying out medical experiments on twins. The upshot is that Lita grew up in a strictly religious farm family with lots of siblings while Olaug was raised by a well-to-do couple who gave her a more liberal, worldly education.

At first, these differences feel insignificant in the blinding light of the movie’s incredible revelations, but once Olaug gets to know her newfound relations better, including the family members who still live on the farm in Norway, the relationship quickly curdles. Some of the simmering enmity has to do with class and some has to do with pedigree (Norwegians and Swedes have always harbored national resentments toward each other), but mainly what we see is these individuals’ true selves, as it were, coming to the surface. When Olaug grows suspicious of the police’s initial finding that Lita’s death was a suicide, she demands they reopen the case and then learns that an undisclosed autopsy determined she had no drugs in her system. The family is relieved because they now think she died of natural causes, but Olaug believes it was murder, an insistence that sends Fredriksson further down a rabbit hole and sorely offends the sisters. Fredriksson tries to keep up with the changing situation, but eventually lets it go where it will, and in the end it’s difficult to trust anyone, including Olaug, whose eccentricities now come across as stark bigotry and self-delusion. The “miracle” may be nothing more than wish fulfillment run amok, and while the story gets away from Fredriksson the movie itself never fails to fascinate. That it was even made is the actual miracle.

In Norwegian and Swedish. Opens Sept. 4 in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).

The Gullspång Miracle home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023, Ballad Film, SVT, Film i Vast, Film Stockholm, Mer Film, Good Company Pictures