Just when you think Japanese culture could not seem more strange and exotic, along comes another movie reminder that the “problems” have a different gravitas over there, and the solutions to them can be downright ingenius.

Little shrines decorate the land of “eight million gods.” You hear the care with which Kobe beef is raised and about the little wraps they put on apples to ensure they reach full size on the tree and marvel over the ways an entire civilization has been built around the pursuit of serenity, “balance” and tiny dollops of perfection, perfection which can include Hello Kitty, manga and a perpetual pursuit of “cute.”

I thought I’d sampled the culture at its most serene and oddly empathetic with the Oscar winning “Departures,” a delicate character study that takes a deep dive into the traditions, mores and taboos of the Japanese way of death as seen through their funerary practices.

But it turns out you can rent mourners if you’re worried yours or a loved one’s final rites will be sparsely attended. And that’s not the only thing that falls under the purview of “rental families.” You can rent a friend or celebrants for your wedding.

“Rental Family” is an almost miraculously sensitive movie about the limits of such “services” in a culture where decorum, saving face, protecting feelings, apologies and shame are appreciated for their real value. And it’s about acting and the core of that “calling,” making connections with strangers while playing a part that entertains, flatters or fulfills them on some level.

It stars Brendan Fraser as a bottom-rung thespian, seven years in Japan, still living job-to-job playing brand mascots, extras, and the “token American” in this commercial or that TV episode or movie. When his unseen agent books him for a gig that requires “a black suit,” he changes clothes — no questions asked.

But when he shows up, even though he’s been warned it’s not a conventional “acting” job, he’s rattled by his sudden immersion in not just a funeral, where paid mourners aren’t unheard of. It’s a fake funeral, some oddball’s weird idea about getting a taste of what friends and family really think of him before he’s dead and gone.

Phillip was a late arrival and a garish Gaijin stand-out in the crowd, but a gig’s a gig, right?

And that’s just a playful introduction to this whole serious world of playing a rented friend for a lonely gamer, an American reporter interviewing an aged actor who thinks the world’s forgotten him or an absentee parent who retains him to convince a child her dad’s returned and will sit for the parents’ interview at an exclusive school that frowns upon admitting the children of single moms.

“We sell emotions” is the pitch the actor/owner of the agency, Tada (Takehiro Hira of “Gran Turismo,” the last “Captain America” movie and TV’s “Shogun”) gives him. “We play roles in client’s lives.”

A businessman embezzles from his fellow employees’ pensions and needs a faked mea culpa, filled with self-recriminations, tears and lots of bows? Tada makes it happen. A cheating husband needs a fake paramour to apologize to his wife? That’s right up Aiko’s (Mari Yamamoto of TV’s “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters”) alley.

Kota (Bun Kimura) is the youngest member of the “Rental Family” team, learning to lie on the fly and fake it until he makes it.

Their new “token American?” Phillip has to pass muster as the fake groom at a much younger woman’s wedding so that she can skip off to Canada to marry her girlfriend.

Fraser, in his first high-profile role since winning the Best Actor Oscar for “The Whale,” takes on the task of playing an actor out of his depth, a sensitive soul who tries to go above and beyond in being considerate of the clients whose vulnerabilities he picks up on.

“I’m messing with people’s lives,” he frets.

Phillip is lonely and vulnerable himself. He’s been on the other side of this equation. He has a regular “date” with the bubbly, hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold Lola (Tamae Andô). Like her, he’s tempted to push the built-in boundaries of such arrangements. Unlike her, he lets it get out of hand.

That bright, brittle little bi-racial girl (Shannon Mahina Gorman) whose mother (Shino Shinozaki) has hired him to help get her into a choice school just melts his heart. And that spirited, fading old actor (Akira Emoto, whose credits go back to the ’70s and include a key role in Takeshi Kitano’s take on “Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman”) would like to escape — if only briefly — from the limited life his daughter (who hired Phillip) has him living in thanks to the onset of dementia.

Fraser lets us see the actor’s pursuit of “truth” crossing over into a fear of “doing harm,” a fear that sometimes sets in after the harm’s been done.

In director and co-writer Hikari’s jewel of a film, Hida plays the voice of Japanese rationalization of this business where they trade on the culture’s ingrained fears of confrontation, public displays of emotion and familial shame.

Yamamato’s Aiko takes the middle ground, impatient with the annoyingly sensitive new token Gaijin, but facing her own epiphany about what they’re doing and what it says about the culture she grew up in.

But Hikari — she did the equally immersive and similarly culturally revealing “37 Seconds” — doesn’t judge and doesn’t take sides in a “which culture ‘gets it'” sense. There are merits and drawbacks to both the Eastern and Western ways of living.

This is probably an exaggerated extension of what “rental families” do. But her artifice is right out in the open — casting a matinee idol as agency owner (Hida), with a succession of gorgeous starlets playing everything from single mom to concerned daughter, fretful, bitchy employee, winsome bride or sex worker.

And in Fraser, Hikari found a “token Gaijin” just hitting his prime in his ’50s, an actor with a “nice guy” image (he’s Canadian) who, like the actor he plays, still dyes his hair but is only just now wrestling with what it is he does, why he does it and the responsibilities that come with that calling.

Rating: PG-13, profanity, sex worker scenes, “thematic elements”

Cast: Brendan Fraser, Takehiro Hida, Mari Yamamoto, Shino Shinozaki, Shannon Mahina Gorman, Tamae Andô, Bun Kimura and
Akira Emoto

Credits: Directed by Hikari, scripted by Hikari and Stephen Blauhut. A Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:43