Helmed by Hikari, known most recently as the director of three episodes of Beef, the film’s inspiration is her fatherless childhood and hearing about Rental Families, an idiosyncratic centuries old Japanese tradition where actors play the family members of the recently deceased.

After seeing Brendan Fraser in his comeback role in The Whale, Hikari found the actor with the emotional register to bring to life an underemployed actor with a faltering future finding a meaningful place in the absences in other people’s lives. Booked for a small gig, our actor finds himself employed at a funeral as ‘white family friend’. Rejecting this Japanese ‘otherness’, he is swayed by the Rental Family boss, played with entrepreneurial determination by Takehiro Hira of Giri/Hiji fame, a man balancing his job’s demands with a practised fatherhood. Soon our actor is ‘father’ to a Eurasian girl needing two parents to enter Tokyo’s best schools, as ‘far-away journalist’ writing on an aged film director with relevancy deficit, and as ‘foreign groom’ for a bride needing to leave both Japan and her ageing parents behind.

With this original scenario, wry humour and restrained pathos, Hikari gently tackles the global loneliness phenomenon where we may all need performers to play the people now missing from our lives.