In 2019, Werner Herzog — of the ““I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder” Herzogs — made a scripted movie about the proliferation of rental family services in modern Japan. Titled “Family Romance, LLC,” it tells the story of a local actor who’s hired to be the father of a 12-year-old girl who no longer remembers her real dad; over time, the line between performance and reality blurs to the point that the protagonist suffers an existential crisis that leads him to question whether the corpses at funerals might actually be dead, and to wonder if his closest relatives are just random people who’ve been paid to perform for him since birth. The film ends with the actor hiding from his own child, his sense of self forever destabilized as a result of the other roles he’s played.
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This might surprise you to hear, but Hikari’s “Rental Family” — a sweet and twinkly Searchlight drama starring Brendan Fraser as a middle-aged American sad sack who moved to Tokyo for a toothpaste commercial, only to spend the next seven years playing the token white guy in a string of unmemorable projects — unfolds a little differently. This is a nice movie: the kind that’s lit brighter than a dentist’s office, scored by the lead singer of Sigur Rós (along with Alex Somers), and aimed towards a heart-stirring conclusion about empathy, isolation, and the power that we all have to affect each other’s lives. It’s about the hard areas of being human, but it only displays a passing interest in exploring them.
For all of its soft and fuzziness, however, “Rental Family” is no less honest than Herzog’s film where it matters — it just takes a more treacly road towards reaching the ecstatic truth. And in this case, a little eyeroll-inducing bullshit goes a long way. Known for “37 Seconds” and her excellent work on “Tokyo Vice,” Hikari may be too straightforward a storyteller to indulge in any explicitly self-reflexive shenanigans, but there’s something to be said for emotional manipulation in the context of a movie that celebrates the fact that feelings — and relationships — can be as real as the belief that we invest in them, even if only for a while.
One telling difference between “Rental Family” and “Family Romance, LLC”: Here, the coffin stuff comes at the start of the film. Constantly apologizing to people in lieu of being sorry for himself, Phil Vandarploeg (Fraser) is first introduced running late to an audition, and the next time we see him he’s literally playing a tree. He doesn’t seem to have any loved ones or hobbies, and his only “friend” is a bubbly sex worker who reappears throughout the film to help Phil to make sense of the kayfabe intimacy he creates for his own clientele. (I can’t remember the last time a nice American-ish movie displayed such a positive and dignified perspective on sex work).
So when Phil is hired — without any kind of heads up — to play a mourner at the funeral of a man who’s actually still alive, we have a vague sense of why he’s tempted to lie down in the casket for a moment after the service is over. Don’t worry, Phil! In stark contrast to Herzog’s version, this will be the story of someone who finds their way back to reality, and to meaningfully participating in life, be it his life or somebody else’s.
Confused and intrigued by his gig as a paid guest at a mock funeral (presumably the most interesting and meaningful acting job he’s had in a long time), Phil finds himself as the newest full-time employee of Rental Family, which is one of the 300 or so businesses of its kind in Japan. People are lonely, mental health is stigmatized, and — in a country where vending machines sell everything from corn chowder to used underwear — why shouldn’t you be able to buy a dollop of happiness?
There’s more than a hint of irony to Rental Family’s slogan (“Providing True Happiness”), but they’re great if you want someone to clap for you at karaoke, come over to your house to play a co-op videogame, or — in a slightly more involved commission — pretend to be your Canadian groom for the course of a full traditional Shinto wedding so your small-minded parents don’t know that you’re a lesbian who’s moving halfway around the world to be with another woman.
Phil dutifully performs all three of those roles over the course of “Rental Family,” none of which are technically difficult or morally unsound.
In the process, he even forms a kinship with his boss Shinji (Takehiro Hira), and a somewhat pricklier bond with his beautiful co-worker Aiko (Mari Yamamoto), who’s hired for all sorts of female companionship gigs. Things only get complicated for Phil when a mother (Shino Shinozaki) commissions him to play the dad that her adorable 11-year-old daughter has never met. The girl’s name is Mia (Shannon Gorman), she’s half-white, and she’s due for a family interview at the kind of prestigious middle school that will determine her entire future. The mom reasons that Mia will have a better chance to get in if her parents attend the interview as a united front, and if Mia — who is not told that Phil is just an actor — gets to know what it’s like to have a father for a few weeks, well then all the better.
This is almost objectively terrible parenting on her mother’s part, of course, as — best-case scenario — Mia is going to have to lose her “father” all over again when Phil’s contract expires. But the relationship that Phil and Mia come to share is cute enough to shirk off the anti-logic of its design, and the what is that woman THINKING? of it all feeds into the movie’s curious ambivalence towards the service that Phil’s company provides. That ambivalence inevitably proves to be something of a performance unto itself (spoiler alert: “Rental Family” is not a finger-wagging takedown of a niche Japanese industry), but Hikari wrestles with the complications of Phil’s job in good faith, and for all of her movie’s handholding sentimentality, she makes a real effort to recognize how the roles that we play in each others’ lives can become confused.
Mercifully, the gaijin of it all isn’t used to poke fun at Japanese customs, or to raise an eyebrow at the country’s unorthodox solution to the social crisis at hand. That Phil is an outsider — and rather visibly so — lends added weight to the idea that people can always hope to recast themselves as they move through this life, and to the related notion that most of us are simply in need of an audience (and willing to go anywhere in order to find one).
Those two ideas most explicitly braid together over the course of a subplot in which the family of an aging and semi-forgotten Japanese actor (Akira Emoto as Kikuo) hire Phil to be “a film journalist” who’s interested in the old man’s story — to offer the actor a last gasp of attention before he forgets himself. The story thread is stretched a lot further than it needs to be, and “Rental Family” is somehow generally overextended even though none of its scenes are given even the slightest chance to breathe; heavy on circumstance and light on context, Hikari’s script tells us next to nothing about who Phil was before he came to Japan in search of other parts to play.
Be that as it may, Kikuo’s saga builds to an affecting gracenote that meaningfully re-centers the movie on the notion that hurt is better shared than buried; that it’s better to place it in a living vessel than to ditch it in a hole somewhere. Fraser embodies that truth all too well.
An endearingly transparent actor whose one hyper-legible emotion at a time approach made him a perfect accomplice for whatever Darren Aronofsky was going for with “The Whale,” Fraser plays every scene in “Rental Family” as if he’s suffering from a pain that he doesn’t know how to disguise. His smile is a wince, his wince is an open wound, and his wounds seem to run so deep that the movie doesn’t have the heart to even tell us what they are.
It’s impossible to watch Fraser’s turn without thinking about the various injuries he’s suffered over the span of his career (physical and otherwise), and that extra-textual layer of personal history goes a long way towards fleshing out the underwritten character he inhabits here. His see-through screen persona makes for a similar advantage, as it allows Phil’s services to perfectly split the difference between the realness of his connection and the artifice of his affect. His relationship with Mia feels real as can be and glaringly fake all at once, which is just as well in a gentle little movie that recognizes truth and performance as two sides of the same coin.
Grade: B-
“Rental Family” premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Searchlight Pictures will release it in theaters on Friday, November 21.
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