Bier's films often deal with the traditional family framework, with the collapse of the bourgeois middle class under the pressure of globalization, terrorism, and war, and the way in which people deal with a disaster or a formative event outside their lives. She notes that the moment that interests her in characters' lives is when their sense of security cracks and the outside world knocks on the door. The main questions in her films are questions of morality: whether it is moral to leave a partner who has become disabled, whether personal good precedes the general good, and how to respond to the violence directed at the individual. Bier often raises questions about how far one would go for a child is in distress, if social services appear to be unable or unwilling to help, and the limits one exceeds to get their own desires fulfilled.