It’s cool but it’s fake, the young girl who is unimpressed by a light installation tells her father. Her father is cool but fake too. He’s an actor who has been working with a rental family agency in Tokyo, posing as a fake husband, friend or whatever his clients want him to be. He has been hired to be the girl’s father to ensure that she gets into a prestigious school.
Phillip (Brendan Fraser) has become part of the Japanese phenomenon that has vexed sociologists and psychologists but proven popular enough to spread to other countries too. People concerned with social appearances, who want events to have quorum, who want a temporary stand-in for a family member or need companions to ease their loneliness hire actors to play the parts.
In Rental Family (2025), directed by Hikari (who uses only one name), Phillip comes to Japan to star in a toothpaste commercial and doesn’t leave. He speaks Japanese and gets by with nondescript roles. His first job for the rental family company is so bizarre that he nearly quits.
But the company boss, Shinji (Takehiro Hira) is persuasive, even though Phillip’s colleague Aiko (Mari Yamamoto) is hostile. Phillip finds that playing the “token white guy” keeps him busy. But when he poses as Mia’s father, he realises that there are limits to fakery.
Phillip also gets a bit too emotionally involved with the elderly actor Kikuo (Akira Emoto), who has dementia. These assignments, apart from testing Phillip’s commitment, also remind him of his own solitary life, the family he has left behind, his foreignness in Japan.
Rental Family is being streamed on JioHotstar. Written by Hikari and Stephen Blahut, the English-Japanese film is a good-natured, understated and gently heart-tugging examination of relationships in a fragmented society.
Rental Family doesn’t delve into the weird or disturbing aspects of hiring out strangers. Instead, the film seeks to provide a fresh understanding of what it means to be a family in an increasingly alienated and uncaring world. By loaning himself out, Phillip forges ties that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. He is imitating life itself, and the experience is eye-opening as well as unsettling for him.
The movie has lovely performances, attractive visuals and an overall sweetly pleasant vibe. Brendan Fraser is wonderful in the lead role – a teddy bear of a man in need of comfort himself, going along with the strangeness of his new job while also learning to unlock his own repressed feelings.
Fraser neither overdoes any emotion nor underplays it too much. Like the film itself, his performance is deftly balanced between comedy and poignancy.
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