People arrive at an elegant Japanese-style inn in a small port called Mitsuse that is a way station between this life and the next. While they are guests there, they will have to decide whether to return to the world of the living, where they are in a coma from an accident or illness, or move on to the next realm, where they will be reborn.
Watching this premise unfold in the Ryuhei Kitamura tearjerker “The Three Sisters of Tenmasou Inn,” I was reminded of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s far superior 1998 drama, “After Life,” in which the newly dead have one week to choose a memory to take with them into eternity with the aid of busy yet understanding counselors. Both films are fantasies, but the former is audience-pandering wish fulfillment while Kore-eda’s touches deep emotional cords with incisive humanism.
So why make a film that is going to draw critical comparisons to a modern classic? Based on a manga by Tsutomu Takahashi, “The Three Sisters of Tenmasou Inn'' is at least not an “After Life” knock-off. And it references, without directly naming, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake that took more than 22,000 lives in northern Japan, giving it contemporary resonance.