‘The Little Sister’ review: Hafsia Herzi explores identity and faith in coming-of-age story

Dir/scr: Hafsia Herzi. France. 2025. 108 minutes.

The youngest of three daughters in a French Algerian household residing within the suburbs of Paris, Fatima (Nadia Melliti) is a religious Muslim and dutiful daughter. She can also be, she realises with rising certainty, a lesbian. Set over a bit greater than a 12 months and divided into seasons, the movie follows Fatima as she finishes college and begins college. In the meantime, she strives to stability and reconcile the 2 core, conflicting features of her id, whereas additionally dealing with heartbreak and a bruising breakup together with her past love. 

This adaptation of Fatima Daas’s multi-award-winning novel The Final One, whereas vivid in its depiction of Paris’s vibrant lesbian tradition, appears curiously slight and modest in its emotional impression given the seismic inner battle the central character wrestles with.

An odyssey of sexual self-discovery 

That is the third characteristic from actress-turned-director Hafsia Herzi, following You Deserve A Lover (2019), which launched in Cannes Critics Week, and Good Mom (2021), which gained the Ensemble prize in Un Sure Regard. Now, with The Little Sister, Herzi graduates to Cannes’s Predominant Competitors. It’s a prestigious slot and appreciable achievement which ought to elevate the profile of the image going ahead. Nonetheless, it stays to be seen whether or not a movie as lean and stripped again as this can have the ability to assert itself when positioned subsequent to the heavy hitters and weighty reputations elsewhere within the competitors.

Within the central function, putting newcomer Nadia Melliti is a coolly subdued display presence. Her Fatima isn’t a younger lady who provides a lot away, whether or not she is sitting silently on the fringes of her household (her two squabbling older sisters take centre stage and many of the consideration) or on the periphery of her all-male buddy group on the boisterous lycée she attends. She’s handled as one of many boys, a passive observer of all of the aggressive crassness, sexually specific banter and the homophobic abuse of Rayan, an out homosexual pupil of their class.

It’s this final facet that first grants us a glimpse behind Fatima’s inscrutable masks. She half-heartedly joins in with the bullying of Rayan, however when he counters by stating that she is clearly a lesbian, she bodily assaults him in earnest. Her misery, following the incident, provides some indication of her psychological turmoil and her struggles coming to phrases together with her sexuality. However this can be a demanding function for an inexperienced actor, and Melliti’s default setting of stony glowering doesn’t at all times give the viewers a lot to work with.

Each the movie and the central character blossom as soon as Fatima meets her first severe girlfriend, Ji-Na (Return To Seoul star Ji-Min Park). Like a lot of the movie, their preliminary encounter is approached with economic system: a meet-cute in an bronchial asthma clinic, locked eyes, touching fingers, a secret smile and a spark. A joyous shared expertise at Paris Pleasure cements the connection, however then, abruptly, Ji-Na retreats, sinking into scientific despair and pushing her lover away.

An odyssey of sexual self-discovery follows, accompanied, considerably incongruously, by a prim and correct cello-led rating. Hooking up with ladies by the apps, Fatima protects herself with assumed names and layers of mystique. Free-spirited new pals encourage her to shed her inhibitions, however her non secular guilt gathers momentum, culminating in a bruising interview together with her Iman, whom she asks for recommendation on behalf of ‘a buddy’.

The movie appears to be constructing in the direction of an explosive collision between the 2 equally vital features of Fatima’s id. The very fact it doesn’t occur – Fatima doesn’t come out to her mom, though she comes near doing so, neither is she outed inside her non secular neighborhood – is, on one hand, a boldly sudden choice. However, alternatively, it’s faintly anticlimactic and unsatisfying, leaving the viewers hanging with a way that some key a part of this story has been left untold.