Rental Family (Japan/United States, 2025)

With its curious fusion of tear-jerking drama and fish-out-of-water humor, Rental Family is indeed a strange brew—one of those films that sounds slightly ridiculous in synopsis but blossoms into something unexpectedly tender when experienced moment-to-moment. Ultimately a meditation on the importance of human connection, the film also works as an affecting drama with lightly comic undertones, the sort of low-key tonal blend that sneaks up on you. It’s easily accessible and features a career-best performance from Brendan Fraser, whose work here eclipses his overpraised turn in The Whale (although director Hikari has said that very performance is what got him the role).

Set in Tokyo, the movie chronicles the difficulties faced by out-of-work American actor Phillip Vandarploeug (Fraser) as he searches for work that's sustainable, satisfying, and—ideally—not beneath him. A lifetime of middling roles and cultural displacement has left him stranded, both professionally and emotionally. Then along comes Rental Family, an agency run by a self-styled visionary named Shinji (Takehiro Hira) whose business model is as simple as it is bizarre: hire performers to stand in as lovers, friends, or family members depending on the client’s needs. Phillip joins a small troupe of these paid companions and soon finds himself cast in increasingly improbable social dramas.

One job requires him to pretend-marry a lesbian woman so that her traditional parents can enjoy the “happy wedding” they’ve always imagined for their daughter while she quietly escapes to Canada to be with her partner. Another gig proves far less theatrical: he spends an evening playing video games with a lonely man who just wants someone—anyone—to sit beside him once in a while. But Phillip’s biggest challenges come in two emotionally fraught assignments. In one, he’s hired by the daughter of aging actor Kikuo Hasegawa (Akira Emoto) to “interview” her father for a fictional profile, providing a reason for Phillip to spend time with the old man and give him something to feel proud of. In the other, he is recruited to play the long-lost father of a young girl, Mia Kawasaki (Shannon Mahina Gorman), whose admission to an elite school depends on her presenting a two-parent household.

Although Rental Family is fictional, it grows from a real trend that has taken root in Japanese society. There is something both fascinating and disquieting about the commodification of companionship, though the film wisely avoids moral finger-wagging. And the idea of paying someone for emotional presence isn’t exactly new—prostitutes and professional companions have been doing versions of this work for millennia. What the movie presents is a more tasteful, less prurient expression of the same impulse: to hire a human accessory who can momentarily fill a void. As the jobs grow more intimate, Phillip finds he can’t keep real feeling from bleeding into the work. His inability to maintain a clear boundary between what’s real and what’s pretend leads to catastrophic slips in both of his key jobs, and the fallout provides the film with some of its strongest material.

If there’s a negative about Rental Family, it’s that it sometimes tries too hard to crank up the sentimentality. A few of the film’s most affecting moments feel overly familiar, as if borrowed from other feel-good melodramas. They play effectively enough but not with the impact they might have had if handled with a little more restraint. Fraser, however, papers over many of these shortcomings. The Phillip he embodies is far richer and more dimensional than what’s on the page. His quiet despair in the early scenes, followed by his moral and emotional struggles later on, make Phillip a fully realized individual.

For viewers open to embrace the oddball premise—and willing to read more than a smattering of subtitles, since only about half the dialogue is in English—Rental Family offers roughly 105 minutes of solid, character-driven entertainment. A human story about the things that bind us together, it plays like an antidote to the blandness of Hollywood’s undercooked blockbusters and to the ugly, documentary-level realities waiting outside the theater doors. With Hikari’s sharp direction and Fraser’s grounded, moving performance, Rental Family feels comforting without being trite and familiar without being stale. It’s the rare sentimental film that earns its emotions honestly, even when it occasionally overreaches.

Rental Family (Japan/United States, 2025)