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

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

The youngest of three daughters in a French Algerian family living in the suburbs of Paris, Fatima (Nadia Melliti) is a devout Muslim and dutiful daughter. She is also, she realises with growing certainty, a lesbian. Set over a little more than a year and divided into seasons, the film follows Fatima as she finishes school and starts university. Meanwhile, she strives to balance and reconcile the two core, conflicting aspects of her identity, while also coping with heartbreak and a bruising breakup with her first love. 

This adaptation of Fatima Daas’s multi-award-winning novel The Last One, while vivid in its depiction of Paris’s vibrant lesbian culture, seems curiously slight and modest in its emotional impact given the seismic internal battle the central character wrestles with.

An odyssey of sexual self-discovery 

This is the third feature from actress-turned-director Hafsia Herzi, following You Deserve A Lover (2019), which launched in Cannes Critics Week, and Good Mother (2021), which won the Ensemble prize in Un Certain Regard. Now, with The Little Sister, Herzi graduates to Cannes’s Main Competition. It’s a prestigious slot and considerable achievement which should raise the profile of the picture going forward. However, it remains to be seen whether a film as lean and stripped back as this will be able to assert itself when placed next to the heavy hitters and weighty reputations elsewhere in the competition.

In the central role, striking newcomer Nadia Melliti is a coolly subdued screen presence. Her Fatima is not a young woman who gives much away, whether she is sitting silently on the fringes of her family (her two squabbling older sisters take centre stage and most of the attention) or on the periphery of her all-male friend group at the boisterous lycée she attends. She’s treated as one of the boys, a passive observer of all the competitive crassness, sexually explicit banter and the homophobic abuse of Rayan, an out gay student in their class.

It is this last aspect that first grants us a glimpse behind Fatima’s inscrutable mask. She half-heartedly joins in with the bullying of Rayan, but when he counters by pointing out that she is clearly a lesbian, she physically attacks him in earnest. Her distress, following the incident, gives some indication of her mental turmoil and her struggles coming to terms with her sexuality. But this is a demanding role for an inexperienced actor, and Melliti’s default setting of stony glowering does not always give the audience much to work with.

Both the film and the central character blossom once Fatima meets her first serious girlfriend, Ji-Na (Return To Seoul star Ji-Min Park). Like much of the film, their initial encounter is approached with economy: a meet-cute in an asthma clinic, locked eyes, touching hands, a secret smile and a spark. A joyous shared experience at Paris Pride cements the relationship, but then, abruptly, Ji-Na retreats, sinking into clinical depression and pushing her lover away.

An odyssey of sexual self-discovery follows, accompanied, somewhat incongruously, by a prim and proper cello-led score. Hooking up with women through the apps, Fatima protects herself with assumed names and layers of mystique. Free-spirited new friends encourage her to shed her inhibitions, but her religious guilt gathers momentum, culminating in a bruising interview with her Iman, whom she asks for advice on behalf of ‘a friend’.

The film seems to be building towards an explosive collision between the two equally important aspects of Fatima’s identity. The fact it doesn’t happen – Fatima doesn’t come out to her mother, although she comes close to doing so, nor is she outed within her religious community – is, on one hand, a boldly unexpected decision. But, on the other hand, it is faintly anticlimactic and unsatisfying, leaving the audience hanging with a sense that some key part of this story has been left untold.