Werner Herzog has long had an interest in the interplay between fact and fiction and an individual's personal interpretation of those entities, with films including Cave Of Forgotten Dreams and Encounters At The End Of The World often revealing unexpected truths about the participants that go beyond the surface, while others like the tragic Grizzly Man highlight the folly of allowing belief to triumph over empirical evidence.

All of which means a company like Family Romance LLC - a real-life Japanese firm that specialises in hiring out people to pretend to be family members - is the perfect venture around which Herzog constructs a narrative to explore some of the things that make the modern world tick. Yorgos Lanthimos fans might remember he took on a similar concept with Alps, but Herzog's approach is, unsurprisingly, considerably more ruminative and less downbeat.

Yuichi Ishii is the boss of the film and plays a version of.