A Bride for Rip Van Winkle

Nanami is a shy schoolteacher with few friends or relatives of her own. When she decides to marry Tetsuya, whom she met online, she turns to a service run by the charismatic Amuro that supplies stand-ins for hire, and staffs her wedding with strangers posing as her family and guests. The arrangement works at first, but before long Nanami suspects her new husband of being unfaithful, and her mother-in-law accuses Nanami herself of the affair. Cast out of the household, she accepts Amuro's offer of work, taking on odd jobs in which she plays a relative for other people.

Shunji Iwai wrote, directed and produced the film, his twelfth feature, following The Case of Hana & Alice and preceding Yen Town Space in Inujima. Haru Kuroki plays Nanami, with Go Ayano as Amuro, Cocco as Mashiro Satonaka, Hideko Hara as Kayako, Go Jibiki as Tetsuya and Soko Wada as Yuto Takashima. It runs just under three hours and was made in Japan by Toei Company, Pony Canyon, BS Fuji and Rockwell Eyes.

On IMDb the film holds a rating of 7.1 from around two and a half thousand votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.9 from a much smaller number of votes. The two are close, suggesting a reasonably consistent response from viewers across both platforms, with the larger IMDb sample giving the firmer picture.