Rose (Marie Bloching) looks tired before she gets to the apartment of her brother Sami (Anton Weil) in “The Good Sister,” worn out after a breakup that she confesses has left her homeless as she crawls into a spare bed. The situation itself is uncomfortable – as her mother Linda (Proschat Madani) wonders aloud after hearing of the arrangement, “Isn’t that a bit cramped?” – but at least she can lean on Sami to make her feel at home, not only allowing her to stay as long as she’d like, but to be a part of his life as she sorts out her own, accompanying him to pick-up football games to take her mind off things.
In Sarah Miro Fischer’s modest but arresting debut feature, the equation flips in a single night when Rose is trying to get to sleep one night and overhears that Sami has brought a woman home, muffling her ears with the pillow at her disposal when the last thing she’d want to hear is her brother having sex. But Fischer and co-writer Agnes Maagaard Petersen take Rose’s appreciation for her sibling’s privacy and observe how it works against her when she learns that what was taking place in the other room may have been a sexual assault, getting a notice from the local police that she’s been asked for her testimony in a case against him.
The film rests entirely on the shoulders of Bloching, a striking presence from the first moment she’s on screen and her growing concern about what Sami might be capable of is enough to make for a compelling drama. Both the legal procedure involved and Rose’s own journey towards accepting what happened can be slightly far-fetched – it may be a bit too on the nose that for inexplicable reasons, she is obliged to pose nude for a painting class she takes as a hobby other than it’s at the point she is most vulnerable – but Fischer makes intriguing choices throughout to stay within Rose’s subjective experience, most notably with the night of the incident itself where the audience is left to wonder what’s happening as much as Rose is as the camera follows the sound across the room. Sami becomes as distant in terms of the story itself as he is to Rose, sporadically popping up here and there as she works things out for herself.
The restraint seems appropriate for a moment in which personal judgment seems more critical to achieving justice than relying on the traditional systems in place, and by largely removing both the perpetrator and the authorities from the proceedings, Fischer considerately expresses how the conclusions that Rose arrive at may not make all that much difference in the grand scheme of things, but that she has no other choice than to make a determination if she wants to move on with her own life after long enjoying the right to leave that judgment to others. What goes on elsewhere may be abstract in “The Good Sister,” but Fischer makes clear it’s all our problem.
“The Good Sister” will screen again at the Berlin Film Festival on February 16th at 1:15 pm at Cubix 7, February 18th at 4 pm at Zoo Palast 2, February 22nd at 9:30 pm at Zoo Palast 1 and February 23rd at 10:30 am at Cubix 7.