Fraser plays a hapless Tokyo-based actor working for a firm that offers bespoke therapeutic role-play services in director Hikari’s silly and saccharine film

Brendan Fraser is a bland and ingratiating presence in this glib, silly and pointless film from Japanese actor turned director Hikari. It is bafflingly complacent in its sentimentality and its sheer, fatuous implausibility, which makes it valueless and meaningless as drama and comedy.

Fraser plays Phillip, a hapless unemployed actor from the US who a few years previously came to Tokyo to do a goofy TV ad for toothpaste and, having no friends or family back home, simply stayed on. He lucks into a weird new source of income: working for a “rental family”, based on firms in Japan which really do offer bespoke therapeutic role-play services, such as errant spouses, deceased loved ones or unsatisfactory co-workers – people who can be chatted with, or mourned, or yelled at for cathartic purposes.

Wheatley’s engaging tale sends Sam Riley’s tough-guy reporter to the home of a reclusive oligarch who has invented a ‘Brain Collider’

On a modest budget, director Ben Wheatley gives us a retro sci-fi with much tongue-in-cheek paranoia, questioning of reality and proliferation of multiverses, and featuring comic-book dialogue that’s been re-recorded, giving the whole thing a sheen of dreamlike unreality. There’s also a lot of quirky lo-fi special effects work with Airfix models.

Bulk is a movie indebted to a mountain of pop culture references listed in Wheatley’s own handwriting in block capitals over the closing credits. Space: 1999 is one – it is good to see it there, and see it reflected in the preceding film – and with the monochrome cinematography, Dutch angles and looming closeups there’s a bit of John Frankenheimer and a little of Chris Petit. The film is massively self-indulgent, often funny, rescued from its not infrequent longueurs by its stars, those very likable performers Alexandra Maria Lara and Sam Riley, who are a real-life married couple.