Film Review: Rental Family
Arts
Rental Family
Director: Hikari
Sight Unseen Productions, Domo Arigato Productions
In Theaters: 11.21.2025
In movie speak, the term “high concept” generally means a simple, easy-to-pitch idea that may be far fetched but can be easily summed up in a few words. Rental Family is the kind of movie that’s so high concept that the premise is neatly summed up in the title, and the trick to making that kind of film work generally lies in keeping it simple without letting it become simple minded.
Phillip Vandarploeug (Brendan Fraser, The Mummy, The Whale) is an American actor adrift after seven years in Tokyo, long removed from his brief fame as a toothpaste commercial hero. Struggling for work and still treated as an outsider, he stumbles into an unusual gig: attending a funeral where the “deceased” is actually alive and eager to hear praise meant for his wake. This encounter leads Phillip to a rental-family agency run by the calm but weary Shinji (Takehiro Hira, Shogun), where actors are hired to fill whatever personal role a client needs. Phillip takes on assignments ranging from anonymous mourner to stand-in groom for a woman seeking to reassure her parents as she secretly marries another woman, to a journalist interviewing the aging screen icon Kikuo Hasegawa (Akira Emoto, Dr. Akagi, Dotonbori River). His most demanding role comes when he’s asked to pose as the long-absent father of Mia Kawasaki (newcomer Shannon Mahina Gorman), a sharp, guarded young girl preparing for a key school interview. As Phillip moves through these fabricated connections, his work pushes him to examine his own identity, isolation and longing for genuine human ties.
Writer/director Hikari (37 Seconds, Beef) knows she’s not making anything groundbreaking or mindbending here, and relies heavily on the characters and their performances to sell the story. Rental Family is a movie that’s both about the human need for connection and our tendency to put off prioritizing it until we’re so desperate to find it that we’ll take it in any form that we can. The tone of the film lies somewhere between Frank Capra and Sofia Coppola (particularly Lost in Translation), and it’s both a feel good movie and a melancholy one. It walks the edge of being emotionally manipulative but largely avoids feeling cloying, and there’s enough truth to the issues of loneliness and longing that it explores to make it worthwhile. The film is at its best by far when focusing on Phillip’s relationships with Mia and Shinji, and while there are some genuinely touching moments, it’s mostly because Phillip is something we don’t get enough of in our protagonists: a sincerely good hearted guy.
Fraser carries the movie on his broad and beefy shoulders, and he’s perfectly cast as the lovable lug with a heart of gold. It’s honestly a far better and less campy performance than his Oscar-winning turn in The Whale, which was so steeped in gimmicky melodrama that didn’t play to his strengths. We care about Phillip because he cares about other people, and try as he might to simply do one job and move on to the next, he can’t bring himself to fill a void in a person’s life and then to simply step away. Gorman and Fraser are simply adorable together, and Emoto steals the whole movie out from under Fraser.
Rental Family isn’t what I’d consider to be a serious best picture contender (it’s neither a great drama or a great comedy), but it’s a good film that touched me on a personal level, and it has the potential to be a minor crowd-pleaser if it manages to draw any crowds away from Oz and over to Tokyo. The lingering feeling of sadness may leave some viewers a bit dissatisfied, but for my money, a truly happy ending would have rendered the movie completely phony and saccharine, and I liked it better for leaving it feeling a bit empty. —Patrick Gibbs
Read more film reviews here:
Film Review: Wicked: For Good
Film Review: Jay Kelly
