Director: Craig Gillespie, 12A, 106min

Stars: Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer, Paul Schneider

On selected release

A sweet-centred parable that treads a delicate line between the faintly creepy and the slightly absurd, this outré tale of one man's love for his sex doll is anchored by another fascinating turn from the increasingly versatile Gosling.

This time he plays a taciturn Midwestern office worker called Lars Lindstrom, an introvert who wears a comfort blanket around his neck, is allergic to physical contact, and lives in the converted garage of his brother Gus (Schneider) and his wife Karin (Mortimer). Everything changes, however, when Lars buys a life-size silicone sex doll on the internet and introduces her - fully clothed, demure, and in a wheelchair - as Bianca, a Danish-Brazilian missionary who is his new girlfriend.

The hook here, and part of the film's zany, fish-out- of-water premise (scripted by the Six Feet Under writer Nancy Oliver), is that everyone in the Lindstrom's close-knit community treats Bianca, as Lars does, as a real person. Fearing for Lars's sanity, they give Bianca makeovers, take her to church, and invite her to parties. The accompanying visual joke, to slowly pan from a mundane social scene, such as a doctor's waiting room, to Bianca's eerily frozen place in that scene, quickly wears thin. But the sense that both Lars's brittle fantasy and his neighbours' thinning patience are about to crumble at any minute keeps the tension alarmingly high.

The film deliberately avoids smutty innuendo, and is instead concerned only with Lars's progress from desperate fantasist to touchable, huggable realist. Typically, despite solid support from Mortimer and Schneider, Gosling smoothes any narrative inconsistencies with a wounded yet unfussy turn. If he doesn't make the film totally believable, he certainly makes it credible.

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