A 15-year-old girl is orphaned when her parents die right before her eyes. This shock opening of Natsuki Seta’s “Worlds Apart” is the reverse of the usual tendency of Japanese filmmakers to focus on the parents of a missing or deceased child. (See Keisuke Yoshida’s “Missing” for a recent example.)
Based on a Tomoko Yamashita manga, the film’s delicately told— if sometimes discursive— story goes light on grieving: Whatever trauma Asa (Ikoi Hayase) experienced doesn’t draw tears. Instead, she identifies her parents’ bodies and attends their funeral with a surface composure. When her novelist aunt, Makio (Yui Aragaki), asks her if she is sad, her answer is, “I don’t know.”
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