When I heard the first movie Brendan Fraser chose to do after winning the Best Actor Oscar for The Whale was a movie called Rental Family , I thought that with that title he was going back to the kind of funny but gimmicky studio comedies he sometimes made earlier in his career. Not so.

This sweet and lyrical movie, which is having its world premiere tonight at the Toronto Film Festival, is based on real life in Japan, where since the 1980s 300 companies specializing in renting out people on an hourly rate have been thriving for purposes of all sorts of companionship needs. This can range from needing someone to go to a wedding you don’t want to attend alone to hiring a boyfriend to introduce to your parents or just having someone to sleep in the other room so the house isn’

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