Herzog goes full Orientalist in this dismal, stilted look at an obscure element of Japanese society. The first thing to know about renting out people to impersonate family members is that the concept is as bizarre and alien to the vast majority of Japanese as it is to Westerners. This story doesn't say anything about "the Japanese" or "Japanese society." It does say a lot about Western filmmakers and audiences who want to represent Japan as some exotic and unfathomable 'other.'

Ishii Yuichi is CEO of Family Romance, a company that loans out amateur actors to play family members. For example, a young woman is having her wedding but cannot invite her alcoholic father for fear that he will wreck the event. Instead, she turns to Family Romance and hires a man to play Dad and help her save face.

This story strand is plausible, and the idea of family roles as performative is certainly one rich with potential. The Japanese refer to their spouses as 'Mama' and 'Papa' even when the children aren't around, so the Japanese aspect of family role as performance is one worth highlighting. Herzog, however, isn't interested in that, and instead sacrifices story in order to shoe-horn into the frame everything weird and artificial he finds on his Japanese sojourn. Robot receptionists in a hotel? Let's accommodate them in a bizarre tangent to the story. Young people practicing samurai swordplay in a park? Let's have our main characters stare at them for an interminably long time. An actual oracle? We can shove our main character on a train to go and meet her for no narrative reason at all. A train employee employing someone else to apologize to his boss on a public platform? Hell, it would never happen, but let's shoot such a scene anyway because my lead prostrating himself on the platform looks so cool and weird.

If you have Japanese friends, ask them if they have hired someone to play a family member, or checked into a hotel staffed by robots, or been to a hedgehog cafe, or kept a robot fish in a fish tank, or traveled half the country to talk to an oracle. Or maybe don't ask them, if you want to stay friends.

Decorating your frame with Japan and the Japanese simply as 'exotic other' is bad enough, but Herzog also casts the actual CEO of Family Romance as his lead. Ishii Yuichi can't act. The poor amateur is out of his depth and his improvisation is just cringe-worthy. He has one facial expression the whole movie - tense. Herzog says he did not need translation as he could sense when a moment was 'authentic.' Sorry Werner, but you really couldn't.

It seems the other actors came from Ishii's company, which explains why they are just as wooden. The mother of Mahiro, the young girl who Ishii pretends to be a father to, is one-note. Only Mahiro looks to have any depth and complexity. Herzog's process seems to have been to make up the scenes on the hoof, then get the actors to improvise on location. The sets are bare and look like show-rooms rather than lived in spaces, and characters sit at awkward angles to each other to accommodate the straight-on camera. There is no thought for framing or composition. The whole effect is one of a glorified home video.

The final shot, a child in blur against frosted glass, is an apt closure to the thematic concern. So three stars for that shot, but three stars is generous, given the blithe disregard for the society and culture depicted.

Werner Herzog explores the strange business of rented relatives in 'Family Romance, LLC' - a guerrilla-filmed Japanese drama about relationships, emotions, and the artificiality of it all. Fascinating ideas, but the poor scripting, stilted performances, and bad camerawork make the movie quite the chore to sit through.

An interpretation of the deceptive world we increasingly inhabit, as an agency provides surrogates for just about anything you fancy. Performed as a convincing faux documentary in Japan - robots next. Imagine how deplorable and low the human race will be able to sink then and you'll never be arrested.