In My Little Sister, jointly directed by Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond, acclaimed actress Nina Hoss plays a creatively thwarted artist dying on the vine in a bourgeois marriage. As soon as the frustrated creator comes across a project into which to sink her energies, there’s no line she won’t cross and no extreme she’ll forego.

It’s an interesting role, except it’s almost an exact duplicate of 2019’s The Audition. There, Hoss played a violin teacher zealously pushing a mediocre student to perform in competition. Here, she’s a blocked playwright trying to keep her terminally ill actor/twin brother alive for a last theatrical hurrah. The stakes are higher in Little Sister, and Hoss brings a tempering Diary of a Mad Housewife domestic edge to her characteristic leonine hauteur, but it’s something of a mystery why two parts in a row look (and feel) so much alike.

Lisa shuttles in a funk between small-town Switzerland and sexier Berlin, beating herself up for being unable to write the plays she used to compose with ease. Encounters with her producer ex-husband remind her of the talent she somehow lost along the way. She’s now married none too contentedly to Martin (Jens Albinus), the worthy, controlling headmaster of an arriviste school. When her brother, Sven (Lars Eidinger), enters a dangerous stage in his leukemia diagnosis, Nina throws herself into his care, neglecting her household and rebelling against the constrictions of her marriage. In ministering to Sven, Lisa redefines her priorities and aims for a creative reboot.

The travails of illness and facing death have been traced many a time in film, and My Little Sister handles the subjects in a linear, faithful fashion. Desperation, misery, and anger play out in meticulously paced scenes. The filmmakers focus a lot of attention on their characters and their actors, but both hew a little close to type. Hoss turns in her usual top-notch, nuanced performance as the devoted sister, while Edinger’s Sven embodies a caricature of a temperamental Euro artist, throwing wild tantrums and sporting a wig resembling an Outback Steakhouse Bloomin’ Onion. When Sven finally breaks down when forced to acknowledge he will never act again, Eidinger gets past some of the flamboyance and reveals raw, vulnerable grief. 

Two unpredictable interludes featuring Eidinger leap off the screen: an angry standoff where Sven confronts his self-centered, ditzy mother (a frail but feisty Marthe Keller), and a singularly ill-advised skydiving excursion with Martin that turns into a terrifying panic attack in the sky. Hoss’s Lisa could have used a similar unconventional outlet for release.

Chuat and Reymond are great with performers and know how to throw in a surprise or two. Here’s hoping for a repeat casting with Hoss, this time in a role significantly different than this (or the last) one.