Rental Family (2025)

Rental Family is the story of a sturdy American who lands in Japan pursuing an acting gig — small commercials, the kind that pay the rent and bruise the ego in equal measure. Seven years pass. He picks up small parts here and there, but nothing of real consequence comes his way. Then, one unremarkable morning, he finds himself cast as a grieving American at a mock funeral, the kind of role you take without fully understanding what you've walked into — until you are already in it.

That accidental audition leads him to the office of Rental Family, a Japanese agency that supplies professional stand-ins — sons, daughters, friends, fathers, husbands and even mistresses — to people whose real lives have left gaping holes where those connections used to be. And so the film truly begins.

Rental Family holds up a mirror to a society quietly fragmented by time, distance, and the slow drift of generations — and to the loneliness left in the wake. Yet the film never once reaches for a sermon. It never tells us we are broken. Instead, it leans with great tenderness into what Phillip Vanderploeg — the American, played again with uncommon brilliance by Brendan Fraser (if you have watched The Whale you know what he is capable of) — chooses to do inside these borrowed roles. He does not play by the rule book. He brings vulnerability to the surface and lets it breathe.

He becomes a father to Mia — a girl who so desperately does not want a father, and so desperately does. He becomes a kind of son to Kikuo Hasegawa (played by the magnificent Akira Emoto), a retired film director slowly losing his grip on the very world he spent a lifetime capturing. He becomes a video game companion to a lonely middle-aged man adrift in the noise of the city. And in one of the film's quietly radical turns, he becomes an unlikely advocate against hollow apology services — his sincerity chipping away at the carefully maintained walls of his boss, Shinji, played with restrained brilliance by Takehiro Hira.

Director Hikari builds upon a rich cultural foundation with an emotional odyssey that moves between gut-wrenching pain and much-needed comedic relief. The cinematography takes you into the heart of Tokyo — its beauty and its loneliness intertwined, inseparable. But it is when Phillip and Kikuo quietly slip away to Amakusa, Kikuo's childhood home, that the film takes your breath clean away. The landscape holds everything the dialogue does not need to say.

Rental Family confronts the moral complexities of performed connection — and in doing so, rediscovers the quiet beauty of the real thing. It touches the full arc of a human life: how a child becomes a person, how a person builds himself from nothing, and how even the most self-made of us still ache for the warmth of another hand.

Rotten Tomatoes' critical consensus describes it as "a sweet-natured dramedy about faking human connection until you make it" — one that gives Fraser an ideal showcase for his sensitive star power, backed by a terrific ensemble.

In a world changing at breathtaking, sometimes disorienting speed, Rental Family asks you to pause. To look at what is being born, and what is quietly, irreversibly fading. It is a film that does not shout this at you. It simply sits beside you, the way a good friend would — or perhaps a rental one — and lets you feel it yourself.