“My Little Sister,” a young home drama from the Swiss writers and administrators Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond, faces terminal sickness with a refreshing emotional candor.
Lisa (Nina Hoss), a gifted Berlin playwright, stopped writing on the day that her beloved twin brother, Sven (Lars Eidinger), a celebrated theater actor, obtained his leukemia prognosis. Since then, she’s been residing in inventive limbo in Switzerland, the place her husband (Jens Albinus) teaches at a prestigious boarding college. However the calls for of Sven’s sickness, and Lisa’s lack of ability to simply accept his decline, solely tug her nearer to her brother and farther from her fracturing marriage.
Distinguished by a modestly discreet directing fashion that enables the actors to shine, “My Little Sister” provides neither false uplift nor dreary realism. The pictures is brilliant and lustrous, the tone important and purposeful. Eidinger performs Sven solely with out self-pity, a person furiously seizing public-restroom intercourse as if keen his depleted physique to carry out. And Hoss makes Lisa a ball of anxious business, her denial and misery maintaining her in fixed movement. Each siblings, greater than something, need Sven again onstage; they’ve at all times been one another’s muse.
Absolving the movie of any shred of sentimentality, the indispensable Marthe Keller, because the twins’ testy mom, delivers her typically shockingly unfiltered remarks with a pique that softens their cruelty. Small in scale and large in coronary heart, “My Little Sister” believes unwaveringly within the palliative energy of artwork: When drugs can’t heal you, typically phrases can fill the breach.
My Little Sister
Not rated. In German and French, with subtitles. Working time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Movie Motion.
