Have you ever had to choose between protecting someone close to you and the peace of your own conscience? If not, may you never be in a situation like Rose, whose brother is accused of a crime to which she is the only witness. There seems to be only one right way out of this quagmire.
Sarah Miro Fischer in her The Good Sister shows us a seemingly simple story: Rose moves after the end of a relationship to a caring brother with whom she has a very close relationship. Everything is going well until one night, when after a late-night party Samuel brings home a stranger woman. Being half asleep, Rose is not sure what she heard, but could she have heard the worst?
Insanely interesting is the character of Rose (Marie Bloching), who on the one hand is lost after the breakup, and on the other is struggling with how the police portray her brother, whom she has a diametrically opposed image of in her mind. Samuel was always helpful, stood up for her, and would never allow harm to come to her. The woman wanders between thoughts, passing successively through phases of denial, disagreement and attempts to understand, to mature to take responsibility for what happened. In the beginning, Bloching’s character is very inconspicuous and lost, but in the end, she is the one who shows real courage.
Samuel’s act of violence had at least two victims. In addition to the woman he hurt, he also hurt (albeit unintentionally) his sister at the same time, who took on some of the blame and tried to right the wrong he had done. We see her in the salon where Elisa worked and feel how much such a confrontation costs her. She takes on the burden that her brother should carry. When we get to the moment when, in one of the scenes, Samuel, crying, says that he is not a monster, it seems to us that the man has hurt himself as well. That he realizes what he has done and regrets it. The evil he has done begins to weigh heavily on him, but temporarily. Very quickly he forgets about it and lives on as if nothing ever happened. The remorse that should torment him, however, does not give Rose peace of mind. They also weigh her down by the fact that she is a woman herself. She empathizes with this cruel act of violence and knows that it must be paid for and that an apology alone is not enough.
Marie Bloching is absolutely perfectly lost in this film. We empathize with her; we are together in this disagreement with evil. And may we never have to be in her shoes, but in such moments, it is simply worth being decent.
The film The Good Sister (directed by Sarah Miro Fischer) is screened at the 18th Mastercard OFF CAMERA as part of the “Making Way” Main Competition.
Kinga Majchrzak