Brendan Fraser is cementing his leading man comeback with Family Rental, as the beating and bleeding heart of a film that’s gently feelgood without plumbing emotional depths. Director and co-writer Hikari’s sophomore film attempts to elucidate the phenomenon of rental family services in Japan, where clients hire actors to play anything from a wedding guest to a parent.
Phillip Vandarpleog (Fraser) is a washed-up actor, his 15 minutes of fame from a goofy Japanese toothpaste commercial all but a distant memory. After long days of just missing famously punctual Tokyo public transport and auditioning, he retires to his depression pit of a tiny apartment to do a wistful Rear Window re-enactment, except all his neighbours seem genuinely happy and there’s no Grace Kelly. Then a last-minute booking to play an unsuspecting mourner at a funeral shakes him out of his funk, not least because it’s a living funeral where the corpse breaks character to better enjoy his eulogy.
As he told the BFI London Film Festival, this role was a “dream opportunity”. Fraser has always had a genius for comedy (treat yourself to a re-watch of 2000 classic Bedazzled to refresh your memory), and bumbling into the position of “token white guy” at a rent-a-guy company provides plenty of opportunities to showcase his range. With some judicious manipulation from vaguely skeevy boss Shinji (a criminally underused Takehiro Hira), Philip embarks on a montage of heartwarming jobs, from motivating a recluse, to venturing out to sex shows, to cheerleading an older woman on her karaoke nights.
But Philip has two more heavy-hitting assignments on the horizon: firstly, to assume the role of an absent father for for biracial schoolgirl Mia (Shannon Gorman) — who needs both parents to help her get into an exclusive secondary school. Then, he must pretend to interview formerly celebrated aging thespian Kikuo (Akira Emoto); needless to say, the emotional juices really start flowing here.
Mia is understandably enraged that her absent ‘father’ is waltzing back into her life, while Philip finds himself caring perhaps a bit too much for a walk-on part. Curmudgeonly Kikuo also captures Philip’s heart as he chafes at the limitations of old age and senility encroaches.
Philip overspills with emotion like he overspills metro seats, barging past Japanese social codes with his American frankness. Fraser pulls it off by making it seem folksy rather than brash. Although it’s hard to see why Shinji is so keen to hire this particular white man when he’s such a loose cannon: Philip almost chickens out of his first role as a stooge groom in a sham wedding, then proceeds to cross all kinds of professional boundaries with his clients.
Any ethical quandies are smoothed over by Fraser radiating Tom Hanks levels of warmth and charm. It’s a deceptively fiddly role, an actor playing an actor, who winds up acting out various roles for real people. But it’s a part made for Fraser and his lovely big, sad eyes. The actor was commended for the clever physicality he brought to his Oscar-winning turn in The Whale and he brings that study of movement to bear, making Philip a broad and leggy white man forever trying to cram himself into Japan’s spaces designed with smaller and more refined people in mind.
It’s rare these days to want a film to be longer, but at a relatively slim 110 minutes Rental Family left me wanting more. The film is neatly if obviously plotted, with all minor tensions resolved into a neat bow for a Western audience by then end. Philip’s spiky colleague Aiko (Mari Yamamoto) who fiercely loves her calling, but is beaten down (sometimes literally) by being relegated to endless ‘apology services’ posing as a mistress for scumbag cheating husbands, gets far too little screen time. I could have consumed a whole TV series on the exploring each character’s backstory.
Honestly, I was hoping to be cracked open in the way that watching Lulu Wang’s 2019 tour de force The Farewell. Rental family services are a rich topic, but this simplistic framing makes it seem like a kooky sideshow.
This is a Japan made palatable to Western expectations. Hikari keeps it surface level, reluctant to tangle with the knottier issues raised in this culture clash between American self-centeredness and Japanese face-saving. The idea that Philip is uniquely lonely in a country where the loneliness epidemic has reached national crisis levels feels myopic.
Most egregiously, Rental Family glosses over Mia’s precarious situation as a minoritised hāfu, an obviously mixed race girl whose attentive but perhaps misguided mother selects a white actor to pretend at paternalism. She alludes to fears of being bullied at her new school, but the racial aspect is left entirely unspoken. Likewise, the obviously well cared-for Kikuo is far removed from the 68,000 people, mostly elderly, expected to die solitary deaths each year according to the Japanese national police agency.
Family Rental is a genuine attempt at cockle warming. Most people will come away charmed, if not hugely moved. But for me, it was an unsettling experience rather than soothing. I appreciate this is far from a universal experience for a critic — but I was an unwitting player in a rental family. For chunks of the year during my teens, I was a pseudo-sister to an older Japanese girl my parents were guardians for. It’s a weird, stressful and beautiful thing to be a temporary family member. This a gorgeous and interesting film, but it barely scratches the surface.
Family Rental is in cinemas from January 2026.
