My Little Sister

1hr 39mins

Swiss sibling drama

★★★★

Identical twins have proved a “fine addition” to horror movies, said Tara Brady in The Irish Times, but “brother and sister twinships” are rarely seen, let alone explored in films. My Little Sister steps into the vacuum. Nina Hoss plays Lisa, a gifted playwright who has put her career on hold to facilitate a “gilded Alpine life” for her family: her husband (Jens Albinus) is head of an “impossibly snooty” Swiss boarding school, where she teaches literature. Her twin brother Sven (Lars Eidinger) is also coming to terms with a career that has stalled – a theatre actor, he is hoping to reprise his role as Hamlet as soon as his cancer is in remission. The script’s “bumpy naturalism” makes for some uneven moments, but Hoss and Eidinger electrify scenes “that might not otherwise have worked”.

Submitted as the Swiss entry for the foreign-language Oscar last year, My Little Sister is a “terrific, prickly drama about family ties tested to the limits”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. Marthe Keller is “gloriously toxic” as the twins’ mother – a “grande dame of theatre” whose idea of an appropriate response to a family medical emergency is to make a round of kir royales. We know when Lisa starts to care for her brother that “collision is inevitable”, but the film’s climax is still “unexpectedly devastating”. There is something “vital” about this perceptive drama, said Jeannette Catsoulis in The New York Times. “Small in scale and big in heart”, it has unwavering confidence in the power of art, and the idea that “when medicine can’t heal you, sometimes words can fill the breach”.