Rental Family, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, has the kind of premise that just makes you assume it’s itching to get its audience sobbing.

Brendan Fraser plays an American actor in Tokyo who starts working as the “token white guy” at a firm that provides performers for real life scenarios. It stages funerals for those who want to hear how much they are loved, and offers up fake mistresses to apologize to housewives whose husbands are cheating.

Fraser’s despondent transplant finds new purpose in becoming a surrogate father for a little girl whose mother employs him as a stand-in for a school interview, and as a pal to an aging actor whose daughter wants someone to play a journalist interested in his career. Cue the waterworks.

However, Rental Family,

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