Spouses Stine and Tate decide to do an unusual experiment with their young son. They move from noisy Copenhagen to the forest for a year. The heroes rent a cozy house on the bank of the river and adapt to a new life for themselves: without prying glances and with maximum immersion in nature. Tate starts a podcast about a new lifestyle, Stine is working on her own book. It is later revealed that one of the reasons for the seclusion was a recent painful experience involving Tate’s infidelity.
Soon, a “third”, or rather a couple, with whom the characters know themselves and literally, re-enters their relationship. They are a kind of doppelganger – the ones in which the dark side of Stine and Tate’s personality is manifested. The peaceful world of the heroes is collapsing, and their desire for self-knowledge leads them into the thickets of the gloomy Dante Forest.
Scandinavian cinema likes to explore an isolated person (from recent examples –“Do not tell anyone”). In The Illusion of Escape, a quiet family drama about the weariness of the inhabitants of a big city turns into a suspenseful psychological thriller about the impossibility of escaping from oneself even at the end of the world.
The film, directed by Carolyn Lingby, was called “Superposition”, which speaks of the same thing whatever its scope (whether quantum mechanics or psychology): about the result when something is superimposed, which leads to new reactions – physical or emotional. And that’s exactly what the director’s debut feature is about – about the stratification of life in the most diverse scenarios.
The heroes’ reality is split in two when Stine spots unexpected guests on the other side of the river. But the first reaction of the spouses was not even fear, but anger: wow, the owner of the house, who promised complete solitude, deceived him by raising the price. Then, during a walk in the woods with her son, Stine notices a mysterious woman staring at Stine like a dangerous Nietzsche precipice and doing the same. During these peeps, Stine loses her son, whom she found in a short time, but the child is not herself. The child constantly cries and asks his mother. The frightened heroine replies, “Here I am, here I am.” “No, you’re not my mother,” insists the crying baby.
Discovering that they are not alone in this micro-universe, the confused heroes decide to return to the city, but there is a trap here – the road through the forest at night always leads them back to the rental house. There is no alternative – you will have to face both your fear and your own twin to be horrified by what you see.
From frightening social satire in the spirit of Jordan Peele’s “We” to pure horror genre like Joachim Trier’s “Thelma,” stories about twins are a favorite subject of auteur cinema.
Sometimes the plot turns into a story about substitution rather than couples. A few years ago, in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Barry Keoghan’s character confronted Colin Farrell’s character with a bitter choice. Having lost a patient on the operating table, the surgeon now has to sacrifice his own child, whose place the orphan intends to take.
In an even older “Birth” by Jonathan Glazer, now Conquers Cannes Film Festival her “Field of Interest”, was about a widow played by Nicole Kidman, once an unknown teenager came to her door. The boy claimed to be the reincarnation of her deceased husband. Perceiving the stranger’s words as nasty nonsense at first, the widow’s confusion gives way to doubt when the young man begins to share such details of the hero’s family life that no one but the husband would know. Now the woman had to understand both the essence of what was happening and her own feelings, to which the old, never-healing wound reacted most acutely.
The Illusion of Escape also attempts to explore the characters’ inner inconsistency through a form of paradox (how did two identical married couples find themselves in the same forest at the same time?). To do this, Lingby confuses the same spouses from different pairs by comparing them: are they as similar on the inside as they are on the outside, or are they completely different characters hidden under a common guise? And in general – is it a gift that allows you to fix everything, or an unavoidable curse?
These complex roads can wander for a long time, but it is important to note that Lingby himself knew exactly the intended route and did not stray from the road. As the story develops and the tension builds, the story only gets bigger and more layered. And that’s a great quality for a thriller that at least wants to be some kind of horror story and tries to stand on a par with clever psychological cinema. Which definitely succeeds.