DO THE PEOPLE CLOSEST TO US become strangers when we witness the worst of them? Are their motivations often the hardest to see through? That is the dilemma that lies at the center of Sarah Miro Fischer’s debut film, The Good Sister. The film’s two main vectors, Rose and Sam, are siblings but they are also more than that. Their intimacy is uncomplicated, almost ordinary. They are close in that effortless sibling way that may look a little too much from the outside. They still wrestle on the floor as adults. Speak through gestures that belong only to them. Annoy each other for sport, still. Sam is not only her brother but also a kind of shelter. When Rose’s relationship falls apart, he’s the person she falls back on without a second thought.

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Until a woman accuses Sam of sexual assault, and Rose has to explore the lengths she should go for those she loves.

Fischer’s premise is most effective in its simple complexity: When Sam is investigated by the authorities, Rose is asked to testify as part of the case. But what does her loyalty really require of her? What does justice, whether it be legal, moral, or social, demand? These are not questions that are new to cinema, but The Good Sister triangulates them with a fresh take: it assigns Rose the role of the protagonist, and anchors her distance from both the brother and the victim as the film’s controversial vantage point. Still, Fischer’s interest lies not in the two poles of Rose’s moral spectrum, but how difficult it is to navigate them for her, more so when it wears the face of someone she’s supposed to deeply trust. Even after his fall from grace, Sam is not a stranger to her, nor a monster safely placed outside the boundaries of her love and affection. That is the trap that Fischer so delicately builds for her characters, and it is in that trap that lies the film’s central conflict.

^{The Good Sister © courtesy Sarah Miro Fischer
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That’s why The Good Sister may be deemed less as a film about what Sam might have actually done than the intricacies that come with forms of intimacy. Fischer is less interested in truth than in the ways emotions interfere with it. When the news of her brother’s transgression breaks, Rose’s proximity to Sam, by default, seems like that it might work in his favor. However, the film deftly turns that expectation around, and that closeness becomes the very thing that cracks Rose’s shell. She knows her brother too well, or believes she does. She knows his habits, his vulnerabilities, the small parts of him that is difficult to translate for others, more so within the four walls of a police station. Fischer understands the inward and outward implications of how damaging this type of bond can be. That to know someone so closely is not the same as knowing what they are capable of. As often goes in life, the person nearest to the source of harm can also be the person most invested in not seeing it, or even worse, in protecting it.

Rose is caught between these two competing ideas of goodness throughout the film. She becomes the good sister, the bad sister, and somewhere in between along the way. At the beginning, to be the good sister, for her, is to stand by her brother, to protect him from the machinery of harm at all costs, to preserve the shared history that has made him more real than anyone else, more than the worst thing he may have done. Her other contradiction is more of the moral variety: to be good is to accept that love cannot be used as a shelter from truth. The title takes on a cruel undercurrent at this moment, for neither version of goodness is stable enough for her to come to terms with for the rest of her life. Both conclusions demand something irreversible from her, and both leave her compromised in different ways. If she defends Sam, she risks becoming part of the problem. If she turns against him, she risks losing not only a brother but a part of herself, too.

Fischer does not inflate this dilemma in any melodramatical way. The film’s most unsettling moments are those that are granular, seemingly unnoticed, in essence. The small hesitations the characters share around each other, their half-glances, half-finished sentences, the pressure of rooms in which everyone knows too much and says too little. Suddenly, ordinary gestures appear in an entirely new light and become even more difficult to read than before. A touch, a joke, a shared bed or apartment or childhood anecdote begins to carry another meaning. Their shared past is not rewritten exactly, but it is put under question, if not suspicion. That may be one of the film’s sharpest insights too, that intimacy does not always smoothen out the past but gives us a whole new lens to see through it.


^{The Good Sister © courtesy Sarah Miro Fischer
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This is where The Good Sister quietly distinguishes itself from more schematic films dealing with similar issues. Fischer makes her stand clear that she’s not interested in convincing the viewer of the film’s arguable politics. Or of absolving herself by ever taking the safer route. The film takes the political implications of its subject matter seriously enough, though not so far as to weaponize them. It instead focuses on the emotional labor that goes into protecting our social roles, more so when it comes to men accused of harm. Much of that labor, the film suggests, often falls elsewhere, especially when those men are loved and protected by the female members of their family. There is the labor of disbelief, the labor of accountability, the labor of searching for certainty on their part. Moving through these pressure points, Rose, too, is faced not only by a question of guilt but by the possibility of dismantling a whole house of trust she built with the people in her life, starting with her family.

The film’s moral tension peaks at the fact that Sam is not outright treated as a monster in Rose’s, or his family’s, eyes. This is not due to an act of sympathy on the director’s part so much as a matter of scale. The eponymous good sister is the film’s loyalest focal point, and it is only through her that we try and make sense of the brother. We inescapably align with her as she tries to decide whether the person he is looking at is her brother, a beloved son, a respected member of their close society, or the alleged perpetrator. Or all of them at once. The Good Sister is drawn to the complexities that lie in many definitions, and the more frightening possibility that their absence hints at: that harm might just as well stem from someone within the circle, from someone who can be at once be deemed as tender, needy, funny, pathetic, and familiar by others. In the process, Sam remains human in the least consoling sense of the word, and Rose’s contradictions around him echo through us all.

Rose, too, is allowed to be human while being contradicted by her own demons along the way. Her uncertainty is unflattering, hard to defend. Her loyalty is far from admirable. She has to admit the hard way that her love for her brother has not made her perceptive of his nature. There is a useful restraint to how her character is being built here. The Good Sister is observant and controlled in staging Rose’s emotional switchs, rarely forcing a scene beyond its natural temperature. The film’s voice becomes the loudest when Rose understands that the language around violence, justice, and accountability can all meld into one another past a certain point and give shape to these gray zones that are even more difficult to parse as a close bystander. She shows the gaps between having the right vocabulary and bearing its consequences. She may understand the world’s moral grammar just fine, but understanding it does not spare her from the damage that her actions, or inactions, inflict on others.

What gives The Good Sister its real bite is the subtle ways it transforms Rose from a passive observer into an active participant near the end, even when it feels it’s not the case. She is not the victim here, nor the perpetrator, nor the judge, and yet the accusation on her brother inevitably reorganizes her life, too. She understands the hard way that the real transgression does not stop at the perpetrator or the act itself. Its implications travel outward and stains everyone involved, until it assumes its own social afterlife. Therefore, the good sister, by the end, may be neither the one who protects nor the one who condemns, but the one who accepts that goodness she was once so obsessed with has become impossible to sustain in its old form. •


[scroll down for an interview with the director Sarah Miro Fischer.]

SARP:  Both your short film Spit and your debut feature The Good Sister examine violence from within a woman’s intimate or psychological life rather than approaching it as a distant social problem. What keeps drawing you back to the point where sexuality, violence and self-knowledge become difficult to separate in a person’s understanding of the world?

SARAH:  I’m interested in bodies generally. I think they hold a lot of what life is about. The expression of bodies is part of that, and sexuality is part of that. And within that, there’s something you can play with. It’s something that is very present in our lives, but that is steered by a lot of more deep-rooted instincts. Because on the outside, you can learn how to behave out in the streets. You can learn the social clues in a lot of different ways. But then when it comes to desire and power, and the more deeply rooted emotions, I feel often they don't let themselves be handled in the same way. And I’m interested in how they show themselves.

SARP:  What you’re saying also circles back in my mind to something you said in another interview. It was something along the lines of that body language is an autonomous form of communication capable of telling a second story that may contradict what a character says. Almost like a second screenplay. It’s also interesting because you also said that actors should know things they do not share with the other performers. What does that kind of secrecy produce in a performance that ordinary backstory does not? How did this whole understanding reflect in the way you built this film and prepared for this film?

SARAH: I think it’s interesting to try and capture the things that are hard to put into words. I think that’s why we make films, right? Because we want to express something that maybe, if just by saying one sentence is not really enough. And then with film, you have the spoken word, but you also have the body language. You also have the camera, the sound and all this. You have so many ways of speaking. And for me, what is very much the most interesting and fun and also challenging part is how to use all these different language techniques and put them altogether to say something beyond words. The body language as well as the secrets help the actors a lot to have a different life. Just also trying to expand the characters beyond “you have to go from A to B,” and you have to say your line, and then you have a character development that starts with the first page of the script and ends with the last page of the script. Life happens a lot between those moments, and you should try and find it.

SARP:  I can also see the reflection of that in Spit. For instance, where the two characters are rock-and-roll dancing scene in the bar. One of the actors is trying to teach the others how to dance, and their movements are awkward. They don’t even know where to put their arms and legs, but there’s a lot that’s conveyed there. You can sense the rehearsal put into that. It’s more an observation than a question, really, but I was particularly interested in seeing that language aspect in both of your films.

SARAH:  Yeah, I think words just a lot of the times are very insufficient. And I think we communicate a lot with all that [physical] attachments. It’s definitely true for my family. I come from a house that is very loving and caring, but it’s very much body-based, all the loving and caring. The words don’t really matter that much. They’re background noise, but we would always cuddle and sit close to each other and, there’s a way that it feels somehow easier to us to do it than speaking.

SARP:  In Spit, the protagonist is trying to understand something troubling within herself while dealing with external problems; in The Good Sister, Rose is trying to understand something troubling within someone she loves. How did that movement from inward investigation to interpersonal judgment affect your filmmaking language?

SARAH:  I don’t think it was an active decision. I think I just like to find this whole complexity. It’s a topic that kind of occupied my mind for a long time, from different perspectives. I think I’m more interested in the aftermath, in the after effects of events. I’m not too much interested in the conflict itself, it’s mostly the starting point of the story for me and, usually, I don’t find it that interesting. What I’m more interested in is what comes after. And it’s the same in Spit, whatever it is that she’s working through from the first-person narration, basically. And we don’t know. But we are with her in this, whatever is going through her mind, the echoes of who she is. The Good Sister is actually is intent to open a conversation for maybe a post-meet moment where we have been talking about the survivor’s perspective a little bit more than in the past decades, and kind of giving them credibility in space, which is super important. And then my thought was: but what’s next? What could the next step in this conversation be?

SARP:  One of the things I find most interesting in your film’s dealing with the notion of aftermath is that almost all of the key moments in the brother’s timeline is either skipped or muffled or sometimes even replaced by the presence of something else, like the dripping of tap water. Even after the interrogation scene, when there’s a moment of near-confession, there’s a jumpcut and we never hear his words explicitly. I was wondering if that was a conscious choice on your part to strip the accused of his voice? I personally found something meaningful in that, especially in its relation to the title, The Good Sister, that this film is first and foremost about the sister and her distance to the subject.

SARAH:  Yeah, I think that has always been a question, something we were thinking about and discussing. Because we’re not in the core conflict. We’re not seeing the film in his perspective, we’re not seeing it in the survivor’s perspective. We are always in the bystander mode, and it’s interesting to just know as much as she knows. And there we come back to the discussion of point of view, to only be where she is with kind of the actions and what is happening so that there’s no way we know more than her. But also, I didn’t want [the brother] to take too much protagonism because I feel this conflict that he has is very interesting as well. It’s like this becoming aware of one’s self almost. It’s almost like we are seeing this process he is going through. You can only kind of not give it space or give it a lot of space. It’s not possible to do it halfway, and I was more interested in the system’s perspective.

SARP:  Yeah, and I think it offers a really unique and interesting perspective in the sense that even throughout the history of cinema or fiction in general, we are more used to having this dichotomy between the perpetrator and the victim. But it was really interesting to see that you triangulate that accountability factor in a way.

I also want to go back to that thing we were discussing in yesterday’s Q&A about overvilifying or undervilifying. I think on the other point of that spectrum, there’s always the risk of focusing on Rose’s suffering might eclipse the survivor’s experience. As much as you try to not over overprotagonize the brother, it might also equally put the survivor’s experience behind. How did you navigate that balance?

SARAH:  It more has to do with storytelling economics. As I mentioned earlier, I was above all interested in the perspective of the sister for this film. Limiting the brother’s space still means he has obviously a lot more space than the survivor just because of the setup, right? But I think you can’t address all questions in one film. Thinking about what this story is about, we really wanted to talk about something else. When it comes to the survivors experience, what was really important for me was to give her a couple of spaces, still. And I certainly didn’t want her to have to explain herself. Like, I didn’t want to put her in a victim’s position where she has to sit and tell what’s been done to her. Just for this film, I wasn’t interested in doing that. And I didn’t want to show the act when it’s happening, which is also like thinking about her character and maybe the dignity of her character. And then I think I wanted to give her one scene where she could, where she could turn it around, you know (referring to the waxing scene). It’s a scene where she gets to take the lead. Even if it’s for one scene, she’s in control. And that was really important to me to give her in this film. To kind of balance out a little bit the biased perspective of a loving sister who is obviously more close to her brother.

SARP:  The English title, The Good Sister, makes “good” sound almost as if it’s a role that Rose has been assigned either by her family or society. At the beginning, does being a good sister mean being loyal? By the end, do you think the meaning of goodness has changed for her?

SARAH:  It’s an interesting discussion, and I know a lot of people have mixed feelings with the ending. I think what I was referencing back to was The Headless Woman by Lucrecia Martel. In the end, when the protagonist is standing in the hallway and then the society is in the backroom and she has to make the decision, does she go back to them or does she do her own thing? And she decides to go back to them. And I think it’s the perfect ending for that film, but it always frustrated me so much because I always felt she’s so passive in that scene. It’s too big, it’s fake, you can’t do anything about it. And then I thought about like a film like the one that I was making where it’s so much about getting stripped of your power. About the power dynamics and being thrown in situations you don’t want to be in, but still have to deal with. And how much are we able to decide and not decide for ourselves? So I thought it was, for me, it’s this ending is very much a conversation with the ending of The Headless Woman.

SARP:  I was wondering, after making a film about how badly, how gravely we can misread another person’s motivations, especially someone who’s supposed to be close to us, has your understanding of closeness or intimacy changed? Or was it perhaps the other way around?

SARAH:  Yeah, for sure. I started writing on the script together with a co-writer, not knowing what I would do if I were in Rose’s place. At least, I wouldn’t have been able to tell when I started out writing, because I have an older brother. I’m super close to him. If I’m really honest, I would have no clue. I remember there was a moment on set when I realized, oh my god, this film is about intimacy. I understood that in every scene, what is actually being dealt with at the core is intimacy. I think [intimacy] is such an interesting, complex, and kind of elusive thing that once you touch it, it kind of disappears. And I’m very interested in how intimacy is being forged, how it’s maintained, how it’s broken, like, all these different aspects of it. In the end, this film is a bit of a personal research around intimacy. As much as I’m interested in the post-conflict than the conflict, I’m also very interested in the tension between belonging and independence, which has a lot to do with intimacy. I’m a very extreme person, I think, and in some ways, I feel like I can be super close, and very far away, and it’s very hard for me to maintain a safe middle ground. 

SARP:  Totally fair. Before we close, what question about the film do you wish interviewers would ask, but so far have not?

SARAH:  What I appreciate about interviews generally is that everyone has a different perspective. So I’m more interested in this other person’s interests and in this person's particular read on [the film]. And then, for me, that’s what makes it fun to engage in a conversation. I mean, it’s essentially a form of conversation and, as all conversations go, the other party  makes a lot of difference. Some people love to talk in a very cinephile way, some about cameras and sound, like all these nerdy stuff, depending on the readership. Then other people are more interested in the more psychological approach, the more research approach, others more in the feminist, post-feminist approach. I’m happy to talk about all of them.

Sarah Miro Fischer is born in 1993, first studied film at the conservatory at Escuela Nacional de Cine, in Bogota, Colombia. After returning to Germany, a script development internship and various projects in set management and as 2nd AD followed. Since October 2018 she has studied at German Film and Television Academy Berlin. She has worked with short films as artistic consultant and scriptwriter, and directed a short film Spit (2021). It won a special mention at the New York Imagine This Women’s International Film Festival in 2022. The Good Sister (2025) is her first feature film.