A Sister (2018)
★★★ — A Sister (2018)
Short films occupy a curious space in cinema. They're often where directors prove themselves before stepping up to features, and the best of them do something that many two-hour productions fail to manage: they make every single second count. A Sister, the 2018 Belgian short from director Delphine Girard, runs to just sixteen minutes, but it packs an almost unbearable tension into that brief window. The premise is spare and unadorned: a woman named Alie finds herself trapped in a car at night, in danger, and must place a phone call to emergency services while keeping the threat beside her completely unaware of what she is doing. That's it. That's the whole engine. And in the right hands, it turns out to be more than enough.
Girard, working with Belgian production company Versus Production, had already established a quiet reputation in short-form work before A Sister brought her considerably wider attention, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Live Action Short Film. The film draws on a real type of emergency call protocol, which gives the whole thing an uncomfortable ring of authenticity. Leading the film is Veerle Baetens, a Belgian actress with a substantial body of work behind her, alongside Selma Alaoui and Guillaume Duhesme. The three performers share what is essentially a single, confined location for almost the entire runtime, and the pressure that creates is, to put it plainly, enormous. Baetens in particular has to communicate fear, calculation and desperation simultaneously, often without being able to speak freely, and she handles that challenge with a precision that feels almost unfair given the constraints she is working within. For those interested in other short and feature films to have come out of Belgium, it is also worth checking out The Second Night and Lingui, the Sacred Bonds, two very different works that share that same Belgian knack for finding human drama in tight, pressurised situations. And if thrillers that keep you genuinely on edge are your thing, my take on When Evil Lurks and Pacifiction might also be worth your time.
A-Z World Movie Tour Belgium Wow. Seriously.... wow.... This was as close to perfect as a short film can get. 16 minutes long and it was intense. It was stressful. It was chaotic. The stress I felt when the lead was trying to speak to emergency services without letting the driver know... absolutely intense. I was near tears at one point. Absolutely perfect.
I don't say that kind of thing lightly, and I'm aware that "perfect" is a word that tends to get thrown around and then quietly forgotten. But there are films, usually short ones, where you can feel the craft operating at such a precise level that there simply isn't a frame to spare or a note out of place, and this is one of them. The confined space, the coded language, the creeping realisation of what Alie is actually doing with that phone call, it all adds up to something that lingers with you well after the credits roll. Girard has done something genuinely difficult here: she has taken a concept that could easily feel like a gimmick and turned it into something that feels urgent and human and real. If you watch one short film this year, make it this one.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2025-05-25
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for A Sister (2018) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Physical: Amazon US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Belgium: The Second Night (2016) · The Fourth Kind (2009) · Kirikou and the Sorceress (1998) · A Cat in Paris (2010)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More thriller: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Angst (1983) · The Long Walk (2025) · Punishment Park (1971)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
