Does unconditional love have limits? Does forgiveness? As women navigating a predatory world where should our loyalties lie? At what cost to our own personal sense of right and wrong? Director Sarah Miro Fischer grapples with all of these questions and more in her intimate and compelling debut feature, The Good Sister.
At first glance, Rose (Marie Bloching) appears every inch the flakey but lovable younger sibling.
Thrown out by her girlfriend in the middle of the night, she shows up at her brother Sam’s door in what is clearly a familiar ritual. The pair share an easy and intimate bond, hewn over a lifetime of shared experiences. As they move about the world, interacting with family and friends, their well-established dynamic is on clear display. Sam (Anton Weil) comfortably inhabits his role as gentle but protective older brother, the golden child always looking out for his beloved but fragile little sister.
Late one night, as Rose struggles to sleep on his sofa, she hears him stumble through the door and into the bedroom. He’s not alone, and good sister that she is, Rose does her best to ignore the sounds drifting through the thin walls of the apartment. When she gets up for a drink of water, she makes eye contact with her brother’s companion as she exits. The woman is not Sam’s girlfriend, but Rose – loyal to the core – would never betray his secret.
When Sam is accused of rape, however, that simple gesture of familial loyalty threatens to drag Rose down a far darker path than she ever could have imagined. Called upon to testify against him, Rose instinctively goes into protection mode, buying into any and all of Sam’s rationalizations, refusing to believe that her brother could be anything but the sweet and stalwart protector she has always known him to be.
Ignoring the nagging tug of her conscience and determined to protect her family, Rose lies to the police about what she witnessed that night. But when she’s confronted with the details of his accuser’s testimony, she can no longer ignore the truth. Bloching’s performance in these moments is heartbreaking, and the scene as a whole is meticulously realized, with every subtle element – the relentless ticking of the clock, the aggressive clicking of the stenographer’s keyboard – ramping up the tension and drawing the viewer deeper into Rose’s internal world.
As the details stack up, and Sam himself begins to unravel, it becomes clear that the question at the centre of this tale is not whether or not he did what he stands accused of (he very clearly did), but what Rose is going to do about it. Bloching’s performance is beautifully vulnerable and complex as Rose flutters between light and darkness, begging the people she loves most to do the right thing so she isn’t forced to betray them. Watching her navigate this impossible situation, the viewer can’t help but wonder what they might do in the same position.
Thanks to Fischer’s extended rehearsal process, and impressively realized performances from every actor who appears in the film, the comfort and intimacy between the characters feels lived in and entirely genuine. We can almost understand why Sam’s mother refuses to doubt him, why his girlfriend chooses to forgive him, even how Rose continues to love him so deeply, despite what she knows him to have done. As we recognize flashes of ourselves in these characters, in their devotion to each other, it becomes much more difficult to simply dismiss or vilify them.
In discussing her motivations for making this film, Fischer has pointed to the fact that while most everyone seems to know at least one victim of sexual violence, few would admit to knowing a perpetrator. Confronting this impossibility, she compels us to reexamine our own deep-seated perceptions and self-deceptions. Powerfully, by choosing to focus on the perspective of neither victim nor perpetrator, Fischer Illuminates the far-reaching complexity of such matters for each and every one of us, daring us to interrogate ourselves as to what choices we would make if put into the same situation.
The Good Sister premiered in the Panorama programme of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival.
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