If god can't figure things out, then we have to.
If there's a working filmmaker who's better at telling stories involving children than Hirokazu Kore-eda, I don't know who it is. His latest to reach these shores, 2015's Our Little Sister, follows 2013's Like Father, Like Son and 2011's I Wish (and, more distantly, 2004's Nobody Knows) in being centered on young protagonists trying to find their place in the world and either maintain existing or forge new familial bonds. Here, the fulcrum is 14-year-old Suzu (Suzu Hirose), who goes to live with her half-sisters, the Kôdas, after the death of their father. The one responsible for extending the invitation is the oldest, Sachi (Haruka Ayase), a nurse who's seemingly in no hurry to get married and move out of the family home. Next is middle sister Yoshino (Masami Nagasawa), a bank teller with poor taste in boyfriends and an acknowledged taste for alcohol. And the youngest is Chika (Kaho), who works in a sporting goods store and remains the most childish of the bunch even after Suzu moves in. All have their own problems -- both work- and man-related -- but they cheerfully take Suzu in in spite of the fact that, as their opinionated great aunt bluntly puts it, "She's the daughter of the woman who destroyed your family."
That line is the film in a nutshell. As much as the Kôdas feel an immediate kinship with the unassuming Suzu when they meet for the first time at their father's funeral (which they make time for even though he was absent from their lives for 15 years), she's still the product of the love affair that led to their parents' divorce. (As one of the sisters points out, he was on his third marriage at the time of his death.) Regardless, they still take measures to involve her in their family rituals, including inviting her to pray at the shrine to their grandparents. And enough mentions are made of their annual tradition of making plum wine at the end of the summer that it's a given that Suzu will be helping out come the end of summer. In this and many other ways, there are few surprises in Kore-eda's script, which he based on the manga Umimachi Diary by Akimi Yoshida, but his films always leave me with a warm feeling of hope for humanity regardless.