Haruka Ayase, Suzu Hirose, Kaho, and Masami Nagasawa. (Sony Pictures Classics)

“Someone is always hurt because I exist. Sometimes it becomes unbearable.” A teenage girl delivers this line with a faint smile in Our Little Sister, director Hirozaku Kore-eda’s moving new drama about family, loss and forgiveness. Adapted from the graphic novel Umimachi Diary, the movie follows three twenty-something sisters who take in their teenaged half-sister after their estranged father dies.

As the movie begins, Yoshino Koda (Masami Nagasawa) is relaxing in bed with her boyfriend when a phone call sends her home to her two sisters, Sachi (Haruka Ayase) and Chika (Kaho). Their estranged father has died in a resort town, and at the funeral the sisters meet Suzu (Suzu Hirose), the product of an affair with their father and his mistress, who had also died. The Koda sisters invite the orphaned Suzu to come live with them, and she agrees.

Suzu forms a new family bond with her half-sisters but gets caught in the middle of a different family drama. Sachi, the oldest and seemingly most sensible of the three, may have taken in Suzu to spite their mother, who left them behind 14 years ago and soon returns to the scene herself.

The plot has a lot of potential for melodrama, but Kore-eda plays it with his usual calm, although swooning musical cues occasionally undermine this tenuous restraint. When Suzu rides a bicycle with a young boy through a cherry blossom grove, it’s the kind of uplifting moment you might expect in an animated film from Studio Ghibli; scenes like this feel like too much.

But Kore-eda, whose films (Nobody Knows, After Life) specialize in a wistful ache that threatens to cross a line into sentimentality, pulls back, much as his characters try to avoid the sparks of a situation that seems guaranteed to create hard feelings. In a telling scene, cinematographer Mikiya Takimoto shoots a fireworks celebration from a distance, the explosions seen at first in reflections on water and in the light cast on the faces of Suzu and other observers; this young girl is affected by a volatility that wasn’t of her choosing.

The film takes its time developing relationships, observing characters walking and talking and eating and talking. Food is significant to these people, whitetail over rice reminding Suzu of her father, curry reminding Chika of her grandmother, and pickled plums make a sour reminder of the passage of time.

Broken families inhabit spaces between modest tatami dwellings and the modern buildings where Sachi works and her boyfriend (who happens to be married) live. This is a film where the location for a simple breakup conversation is fraught with meaning: it takes place on a set of stone steps that leads from a busy roadway down to the seashore, between solid ground and the ephemeral sea. Closing with the four sisters walking on the seashore, it can be tempting to see Our Little Sister as an arthouse Hallmark movie, but when its repressed emotions finally come to the surface, it’s devastating.

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Our Little Sister
Written and directed by Hirozaku Kore-eda
Adapted from the graphic novel by Akimi Yoshida.
With Haruka Ayase, Masami Nagasawa, Kaho
Rated PG for thematic elements and brief strong language
128 minutes
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema