The Good Sister

 

“Between good and evil there is not always a clear line; often there is a space in which we must decide who we are.”
 — Hannah Arendt 

Sarah Miro Fischer’s film belongs to a strand of contemporary European cinema that probes the fractures of perception and consciousness. Here, the drama does not lie so much in establishing guilt or innocence, but in questioning the very nature of truth when it becomes entangled with affective bonds. 

The protagonist is suspended in an irresolvable tension: to believe her brother means to deny the voice of the victim; to acknowledge the latter implies dismantling a familial image constructed over time. It is within this intermediate space — where every choice entails a loss — that the film builds its ethical and existential framework. 

“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never merely as a means.”
 — Immanuel Kant 

The scene at the beauty salon is exemplary. Not so much for its physical rawness, but for the symbolic short circuit it generates. The protagonist voluntarily undergoes a painful, ritualized, and socially normalized treatment that nonetheless implies a form of bodily intrusion. The gesture acquires an almost penitential dimension, as if pain could become a language through which to understand — or expiate — something that remains unspeakable. Here, the female body emerges as an ambiguous territory, simultaneously subject and object, a site of agency and exposure. 

Even more radical is the sequence in which she poses for a group of painting students. In this setting, her body is inscribed within a regime of visibility that transforms it into an aesthetic object. Yet the instructor’s reflection introduces a decisive shift: what we see is never neutral, but depends on the quality of the gaze. It is observation that determines the ontological status of things. 

From this perspective, the protagonist becomes a field of tension between two possibilities: being an object — a body observed, reduced to surface — or a subject — a presence that resists, that exceeds the gaze. The scene destabilizes any fixed distinction between these dimensions, suggesting that identity itself is always exposed to the gaze of others, and is therefore inevitably unstable. 
 

A further level of reflection on the gaze can be traced through an ideal dialogue with Vénus noire, where the exposed, studied, and observed body in 1817 Paris becomes the site of a violence that is not necessarily physical, but epistemic and symbolic. Similarly, here too the gaze is never innocent: to observe already means to intervene, to define, to reduce. If in the film by Abdellatif Kechiche the scientific and spectacular apparatus constructs a dispositif that transforms the female body into an object of knowledge and consumption, The Good Sister offers a contemporary variation—more subtle, yet no less incisive. What changes is the form, not the structure: the same tension persists between visibility and appropriation, between exposure and the loss of subjectivity, in which the female body is constantly at risk of being reduced to a readable surface, denying its irreducible interiority. 

A further striking and conceptually charged scene unfolds when Rose approaches and attempts to seduce a man, staging a situation that gradually drifts toward a non-fully consensual sexual encounter. At first, the dynamic appears reciprocal, even desired; yet as the interaction progresses, a subtle asymmetry emerges. The man begins to perceive that he is being drawn into a situation in which control no longer belongs to him, but is instead being exercised upon him. His reaction — marked by hesitation, discomfort, and eventual withdrawal — exposes the fragile boundary between consent and coercion. What the protagonist constructs here is not merely a provocation, but a deliberate inversion: a scenario in which the roles traditionally associated with gendered power and sexual violence are reversed. Through this unsettling experiment, the film interrogates the mechanisms of desire, agency, and domination, revealing how easily consent can become obscured when power shifts, and how essential it is to recognize its presence — or absence — beyond conventional assumptions. 

 Although the film’s gaze focuses on a form of violence that, due to social dynamics and perceptions, risks being downplayed or even minimized, the need for an ethical stance emerges with force. A tension that, in some respects, recalls the dramatic experience of Cassie in Promising Young Woman, where  what is systematically underestimated is precisely the gravity of ambiguous or denied consent. In this sense, the film refuses to yield to the patriarchal cultural framework that tends to normalize, justify, or mitigate violence, and instead insists on a critical gaze capable of recognizing it in its entirety, even when it manifests in less visible, yet no less devastating, forms. 

 

The film thus operates through a genuine ontological fracture: there is no reality given once and for all, only interpretations that emerge from situated positions. This is also reflected in the treatment of consent, a central and deeply contemporary issue. Here, consent is not a mere legal formality, but a grey zone shaped by ambiguity, diverging perceptions, and asymmetries of power. 

The Good Sister compels the viewer to confront an uncomfortable question: how much can we truly know the other? And to what extent is our gaze capable of grasping truth without distorting it? 

In legal terms, the film clearly recalls a principle that has become fundamental: consent must be explicit, freely given, and informed. It cannot be presumed, nor inferred from ambiguous behavior or prior relationships. It must also be revocable at any moment, without the need for justification or consequence. In the absence of these conditions, any sexual act constitutes a violation. Despite its narrative ambiguity, the film implicitly reaffirms the necessity of this legal framework as a minimum safeguard for the protection of the individual. 

In this sense, the film constructs a viewing experience that destabilizes, compelling a reconsideration of the categories of innocence, guilt, victim, and perpetrator. The protagonist does not arrive at a resolution, but at a more hybrid awareness: that every human relationship is traversed by an irreducible margin of opacity, and that it is precisely within this opacity that the possibility — or impossibility — of an ethics of recognition is at stake. 

“Sex without consent is rape. It’s not complicated.”
 — Rainn Wilson