On the formal argument in Hirokazu Kore-eda's Our Little Sister (2015) and what it finds.

Our Little Sister is based on a manga series and follows three adult sisters who, after their estranged father's death, invite his daughter from another relationship to live with them. The film runs two hours and thirty minutes. Almost nothing happens.

Kore-eda's method here is the most formally gentle in his filmography: the camera watches the daily life of the household — meals, domestic tasks, casual conversations — with the patience of genuine attentiveness rather than narrative selection.

The formal argument is about what film can do that drama cannot: it can attend to the texture of everyday life without requiring that texture to generate incident. The meals in Our Little Sister are not scenes where revelations occur. They are meals. The walks through Kamakura are not scenes where characters articulate their inner states. They are walks.

The emotional content accumulates through the accumulation of these ordinary moments, not through their disruption. By the time the film reaches its most emotionally significant sequences, the significance is available not because the narrative has been building toward it but because the film has been paying attention.