The year is 1987. Halloween is on the horizon. You can tell because there’s a calendar hanging in the kitchen marking down the days. More importantly, the footage of Erin Vassilopoulos’ Superior is intentionally dated-looking, reflecting the lo-fi technology and grainy look of the end of the Regan era. After escaping a dangerous ex, Mary retreats to her unsuspecting identical twin sister’s suburban home, the perfect (and only) hideout she can think of in her unsuspecting Middle America hometown.

Despite identical genetic code, their personalities clash. Mary (Alexandra Mesa, who also served as the film’s co-writer alongside Vassilopoulos) is a journeywoman, a rebellious bleach-blonde rocker made up in stylish black clothes and dark makeup. Her sister Vivian (Ani Mesa, real-life twin of Alexandra Mesa) is professionally dressed and similarly-mannered with window-box bangs and regularly scheduled sexual encounters with her husband, a means to the ends of motherhood.

Having grown up together; inseparable from the womb, connected in a way that few siblings are; the two sister’s memories become jumbled and confused. Vivian recalls injuries that Mary sustained as her own. Following a six-year estrangement, the two come back into one another’s orbit and find their personalities begin to blend and intersect, increasingly so as they swap out who they are, even cutting their hair to become truly interchangeable, living out days in the life of each other’s shoes, losing themselves to the lie.

As Mary becomes increasingly paranoid that her ex will find her, she cycles through vivid daydreams that propel her fear of her leather-jacketed stalker and his three identical wolf dogs into her waking consciousness. As Mary spirals, Vivian finds renewed vitality in the absence of a pregnancy but twintuition compels her to believe something isn’t quite as it seems. In the shadow of doubt, she continues to benefit from the escapism that their trading places afford. After the pieces are set in place for some kind of showdown centered on the twin’s mistaken identity, Superior stagnates getting to and delivering the third act goods, encountering issues of pacing and momentum that drag the inevitable climax a bit past its expiration only to arrive at a predictable clunker of an ending.

Director Erin Vassilopoulos is able to create an old-school small-town vibe that’s reminiscent of Halloween’s Haddonfield where the clanging synth-stabbed score from Dan Wilcox penetrates the facade of suburban niceties. She packs Superior with the flavor of the 80s, including the culinary delights of sweet potato marshmallow casserole, home workout videos, SNES platformer games, and monochromatic everything. It’s a throwback in the purest sense that captures both the aesthetics and psychosexual moviemaking earmarks of the time, most notably reflecting the works of de Palma, Lynch, and Cronenberg (particularly his identical-twin-thriller Dead Ringers) but one that’s more interested in the appearance of angst and complexity than figuring out what exactly that means in the context of this story.

The film as a whole is more driven by mood and character than it is by plot, which deteriorates into near-indifferent banality well before the final frame and fails to adequately illuminate the conflict at the story. Expanded from a 2015 short film of the same name, Superior still feels undercooked and loose; a narratively lacking, minor-key experiment that fades from memory shortly after watching. It doesn’t all add up to a ton but the time everything is over with, Superior suggests a waxing talent in Vassilopoulos and the Mesa twins and is powered by enough edgy nostalgic flair and feminine verve to justify a watch. If only it were more than just that.

CONCLUSION: Erin Vassilopoulos’ ‘Superior’ is a moody psychological drama that suffers a middling script while leaning on effective, evocative aesthetics and too-subtle character development.