Middle-aged service worker Hideo (Itsuji Itao) shares his tiny apartment with an inflatable sex doll (Bae Doona, “Sense8”) in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Air Doll,” a contemplative, melancholy — if minor — study of loneliness. (This 2009 film from the director who would go on to make “Shoplifters” and “The Truth” is getting its first U.S. release.)
And though the label on the box reads “Lovely Girl Candy,” and Hideo finds real human interaction “annoying,” he gives the doll the name “Nozomi,” after a former girlfriend. She’s as close to being real as he wants, and she silently absorbs his minor monologues and grievances about his work day before he has sex with her.