‘Sister Brother Manhole Cover’ review: Milcho Manchevski serves up a darkly comic exploration of North Macedonia’s wealth divide

Dir/scr: Milcho Manchevski. North Macedonia/Bulgaria/Serbia. 2026. 116mins

A brother and sister barely scraping by on the outskirts of Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, find refuge in an unlikely place after a sex-for-medical-care deal goes wrong in Milcho Manchevski’s Sister Brother Manhole Cover, The North Macedonian director reunites with most of the cast from 2019’s Kaymak for a vaguely satirical allegory skewering his country’s widening wealth gap, as well as our increasingly fluid concept of family.

Manchevski takes his time folding back the layers on his characters

Essentially told in three parts – the first a crime thriller, the second a road trip comedy and the third a neo-Hansel and Gretel family drama – Manchevski steps back from his usual weighty straight-ahead drama to dabble in more overt dark humour, while still finding a way to comment on contemporary Macedonian society and its most pressing challenges. Evocatively photographed by Stefano Falivene (Abel Ferrara’s Siberia) and with outstanding performances that makes the sillier parts feel real, Sister Brother… bears many of the Manchevski’s formal hallmarks as well as his usual humanism.

Manchevski has been a regular on most festival radar since his 1994 debut Before The Rain won the Golden Lion at Venice and earned an Oscar nomination. He followed that with Dust (2001), Mothers (2010), and this year’s documentary Good People, about a Kocani nightclub fire. Sister Brother Manhole Cover should travel to further festivals following its Tokyo competition debut, and the film’s timely subject matter and black humour should appeal to distributors that found audiences for class comedies like Ruben Östlund’s Triangle Of Sadness and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite.

Late at night, unemployed Malina (Sara Klimoska, also star of Manchevski’s Willow) cruises Skopje’s quiet streets on a motorised three-wheeled cart with her brother Viktor (Filip Trajković), looking for sewer covers and unguarded bronze busts of national heroes they can swipe and sell for scrap metal. It’s their only income. Malina is practical and slightly hardened, not ashamed to use sex as currency when needed to protect Viktor, and she’s got a undiagnosed heart condition. Her medical needs are, however, not a priority as it’s not something she can afford to deal with.

Viktor – the muscle of the partnership – is neurodiverse, and when he smashes his foot one night and needs a doctor, Malina takes desperate measures. When the corrupt doctor she finds, Mile (Dejan Lilić), winds up dead by a manhole cover (a sequence that’s both gruesome and funny) Marina and Viktor hit the road, Making stops at their usual scrap dealer, Brad Pitt (Petar Mirčevski) and their estranged parents (Jordan Simonov and Jasmina Vasileva), they finally arrive at Mile’s palatial home, where they meet his blind mother Todora (Sonja Mihajlova), also a doctor.

Manchevski takes his time folding back the layers on his characters, and the film is all the better for it. It also affords Klimoska, Trajković and Mihajlova ample room to move, and reveal their characters at a believable pace. While it initially feels as if Malina is taking advantage of her gentle giant brother, when he’s hurt and needs expensive medicines her pivot to obsessively protective sister is entirely believable. Much of the story works precisely because Klimoska and Trajković have an easy dynamic that makes their scheming a lot more charming than it needs to be. Similarly, Mihajlova infuses Todora with a weary wisdom as it pertains to her son; he’s a scumbag and she knows it.

The performance are all in service to Manchevski’s bigger picture: the reclamation of lost families and, chiefly, the scourge of late-stage capitalism and the gaping chasm between rich and poor. Casual corruption, rampant abuse and poverty sit almost side-by-side with outrageous wealth, and Manchevski’s focus is on a ruined system left in the wake of broken political promises. He favours garish, saturated colour for the reality of the slum Malina and Viktor call home, bright sunshine in dreams, and hard lighting, deep shadows and inky blacks for the city the siblings sneak around at night.

Vaguely reminiscent of Before The Rain in its construction – specifically the way in which the narrative circles back to its beginning – Sister Brother… loses some momentum late in the second act. Yet it recovers enough to stick the landing, and keep its middle finger firmly raised.