Rental Family (2025)
Brendan Fraser’s remarkable second act continues with Rental Family, a Tokyo-set dramedy that asks what happens when you hire someone to love you. Or at least to act like they do. Fraser plays Phillip Vandarploueg, an American actor whose Japanese career has plateaued somewhere around toothpaste advertisements. When he takes work with a rental family agency (yes, these actually exist in Japan), he finds himself playing hired roles in other people’s lives: the grieving stranger at a funeral, the compliant groom at a wedding, the long-lost father who never existed in the first place.
Director Hikari, working from a script she co-wrote with Stephen Blahut, could have let this premise curdle into something cloying or ethically queasy. Instead, she’s made something thoughtful. The rental family phenomenon isn’t just about deception for its own sake. It speaks to the gap between what people feel and what Japanese social structures permit them to express. In a culture where maintaining face often means swallowing genuine emotion, these hired actors become outlets for feelings that have nowhere legitimate to go. There’s something both sad and oddly practical about the whole arrangement.
Fraser does what he does best here: he brings warmth to a character who could easily seem pathetic. His Phillip is desperate, certainly, but also genuinely empathetic, a man who backs into purpose through pretending. The complications come when he takes on the role of absent father to young Mia (Shannon Gorman), whose single mother needs a two-parent household to satisfy a prestigious school’s interview requirements. The relationship develops exactly as you’d expect, which is to say it becomes emotionally messy in ways that highlight the ethical quicksand beneath the entire enterprise. To Hikari’s credit, she doesn’t shy away from this. Not entirely, anyway.
Takehiro Hira brings unexpected complexity to Shinji, the agency’s owner. What starts as a straightforward performance (efficient businessman, morally unbothered) gradually reveals layers that complicate our assumptions about who’s performing what for whom. Mari Yamamoto as fellow actor Aiko and Akira Emoto as elderly client Kikuo round out an ensemble that feels lived-in rather than sketched.
The visual approach here matters. Cinematographer Takurō Ishizaka shoots Tokyo in bright daylight rather than the usual neon-drenched nightscapes we’ve come to expect from films set in this city. The choice reinforces the film’s interest in visibility: what we show, what we hide, what we perform even when we think nobody’s watching. Empty parks, quiet train stations, spaces where people might briefly drop their social masks. It’s effective.
Where the film stumbles, I think, is in its eventual unwillingness to sit with moral ambiguity. The third act resolves things a touch too neatly, particularly regarding Phillip’s relationship with Mia. The film raises genuinely uncomfortable questions about hired intimacy and what happens when a child’s authentic affection gets directed at a fictional construct. But it ultimately pulls back from the harder implications. Whether that’s a flaw or a mercy depends on what you want from your cinema. Some will appreciate the emotional safety net. Others might wish for something sharper.
These reservations aside, Rental Family works both as character study and cultural observation. It examines how capitalism commodifies connection itself, how loneliness creates markets, how genuine feeling can emerge from manufactured circumstances. Not exactly revolutionary insights, perhaps, but handled with enough care to feel earned rather than imported from a screenwriting manual.
The film suggests, finally, that all relationships require performance to some degree. That the line between genuine and fabricated connection might be less distinct than we’d like to believe. We’re all acting to some extent, playing versions of ourselves to navigate social existence. Rental Family just makes the transaction explicit and charges for it.
It’s a modest film with immodest ambitions, a feel-good dramedy that doubles as a meditation on loneliness, belonging, and the peculiar human need to connect even when we know we’re being sold something. Fraser carries it with the same tenderhearted intelligence he brought to The Whale, and the result is genuinely affecting. Four stars feels about right.