There are few directors in the world who can take a premise about an inflatable sex doll that comes to life and make it a profound and moving film, rather than a facile and pornographic exercise, but Hirokazu Kore-eda is, as expected, up to the challenge. “Air Doll,” based on the manga by Yoshiie Goda, is shot in the filmmaker’s meditative style, and is a treatise on city life, loneliness and misogyny.

In the opening shot, a man (Itsuji Itao) is sitting on a train, wearing a brown duffel coat. He goes grocery shopping, and walks through the rain to return home to eat and chat with someone we take to be his significant other. But we quickly learn that his companion is an inflatable sex doll of the cheap vinyl variety, which he has named Nozomi. After having sex with the doll, there’s a scene where he washes out the plastic vagina. Lucky for viewers, he’s not the protagonist of the film; in the next scene, the doll comes to life.

Nozomi (Bae Doo-na) wanders out into the world in a strangely chaste-looking French maid outfit (more cosplay than kink), innocent as a newborn child, learning words like “burnable garbage” and interacting with the people in her neighborhood. Small, everyday tragedies unfold with precision and economy. There’s a woman who goes to the police station every day to confess to crimes she did not commit; a man on a respirator who sits on a park bench, alone; a single father who doesn’t quite know how to relate to his young daughter; and a woman who fears that growing old and losing her beauty will cause her to lose her job.

On her way home, Nozomi encounters a shop that, like her body, is a site where fantasies play out: a video store called Cinema Circus. There, she meets Junichi (ARATA), and secures a job despite not knowing anything about movies. And so she begins a journey into human emotion, experiencing everything from pure joy to devastating pain.

Bae is excellent as Nozomi. Had her performance been lacking, “Air Doll” would seem soulless, despite solid efforts from the rest of the cast. The pacing and direction is elegant and steady throughout, until the last sequence of the film. As with his 2009 film “Still Walking,” where he felt it necessary to tack on a voiceover to achieve maximum emotional resonance, Kore-eda resorts to blatant film trickery to hammer home the narrative resolution. Rather than trust viewers, and his own filmmaking skill, he intervenes with unnecessary CGI to aid in wrapping up the story. The same directorial decision from a lesser filmmaker may have been forgivable, but Kore-eda’s talent is so great that this move marred the enjoyment of an otherwise good film.

3/5 Stars by Doretta Lau.

(Japan) Directed and written by Hirokazu Kore-eda. Starring Bae Doo-na, ARATA, Itsuji Itao and Joe Odagiri. Category IIB, 117 minutes. Continuing.