A Brendan Fraser drama, a Japanese business built around rented companionship, and a film that nearly had me sobbing at 35,000 feet.
Spoilers throughout.
I watched Rental Family on a plane. Where to? I haven’t the faintest idea, and frankly it doesn’t matter. I remember the small screen, the headphones and the fact that I was strapped into a seat with nowhere particularly interesting to go for the next couple of hours. I was a captive audience, which seemed harmless enough until the film started working its way under my skin. By the time the story reached its final stretch, I was trying very hard not to cry in front of a cabin full of strangers. Not a discreet little moist-eyed reaction, either; the sort of crying that might have required explaining myself to a flight attendant, who already had enough to deal with without an emotional incident in economy class.
I went into it knowing little more than that Brendan Fraser was involved and that the story concerned a peculiar Japanese business supplying actors to impersonate relatives and companions. It sounded like a premise that might become either a quietly amusing comedy or an insufferably manipulative tearjerker. It turns out to be a tearjerker, all right, but one that earns its effect with excellent performances, sensible pacing and a genuine affection for its characters. I was surprised by how beautiful I found it, and perhaps even more surprised by how unwilling I was to say goodbye to these people when the credits arrived.
An Actor for Hire, a Life on Hold
Fraser plays Phillip Vandarpleog, an American actor who has lived in Tokyo long enough for the city to become familiar without ever feeling quite like home. His career consists of advertisements, minor roles and the sort of work that pays the bills without offering much reassurance that the years have added up to anything. There’s a particular kind of disappointment in continuing to do what you trained for long after the opportunities you imagined have quietly disappeared. Phillip doesn’t make grand speeches about failure; he simply moves through his apartment and the streets around it with the faintly defeated air of somebody who expected life to have acquired a clearer shape by now.
Then he encounters Rental Family, an agency run by Shinji Tada (Takehiro Hira) that supplies people to stand in for the absent or inconvenient figures in somebody else’s life. An actor might be hired as a groom, a father, a grieving friend or a supposedly interested journalist. It is performance without an audience that knows it is watching a performance, and sometimes without the knowledge or consent of the person being deceived. Phillip needs the work, but he also finds an unexpected satisfaction in becoming important to somebody for a few hours. What he hasn’t considered is that a connection can outlast the invoice.
The Strange Business of Being There
The film’s underlying profession isn’t invented. Services supplying substitute companions and relatives have existed in Japan, although the industry is more varied and less neatly organised than a fictional agency can suggest. What fascinates me is not the apparent strangeness of paying somebody to occupy a social role, but the very ordinary anxieties behind it: avoiding embarrassment, reassuring parents, smoothing over a difficult conversation, or pretending that a family is in better condition than it actually is. None of those impulses is exclusively Japanese, even if the film places them inside a specifically Japanese social setting.
Hikari’s film avoids turning Tokyo into an anthropological curiosity for the visiting Westerner. Phillip is the outsider, but the people he meets aren’t props in a tour of exotic customs. They have recognisable disappointments and pressures, and the camera gives their lives a degree of dignity that a broader comedy might have sacrificed for an easy joke. The troubling question, which the film never entirely resolves, is what happens when the genuine human need for attention becomes a service that can be purchased, scheduled and cancelled.
A Wedding, a Funeral and a Few Useful Lies
The early assignments establish the peculiar rules of this world with a mixture of deadpan comedy and low-level discomfort. At one staged funeral, the supposedly deceased man is still alive and listening to what others might say about him. It is an absurd theatrical exercise, yet the wish beneath it is easy to understand: he wants to know whether anyone would miss him. The joke becomes a little less funny once you realise that his need for reassurance is real, even if the occasion is not.
Another job requires Phillip to pretend to be the groom in a wedding arranged to satisfy family expectations while allowing the bride, Yoshie, to pursue a life with the woman she loves. The ceremony involves deception, but the affection the arrangement is meant to protect is genuine. I like that the film lets those contradictions remain uncomfortable rather than issuing a tidy moral verdict. Honesty would be simpler in an ideal world, but some of these people are negotiating a world that hasn’t made much room for their truth.
Mia and the Father Who Was Never There
The emotional heart of the film is Mia Kawasaki, played by Shannon Mahina Gorman, whose mother Hitomi hires Phillip to impersonate Mia’s absent American father. The immediate aim is practical: an elite school’s admissions process appears more accommodating to a two-parent household. But there’s no such thing as a purely practical deception when the person involved is a child who has spent years wondering why her father left. Mia does not greet Phillip with instant, cinematic adoration. She is suspicious and angry, as she has every right to be, and the film allows the awkwardness to settle before their friendship begins to grow.
Their gradual closeness is where the direction and performances become especially impressive. The Monster Cat Festival, with its costumes and ridiculous face paint, is charming partly because neither character seems particularly interested in performing for the viewer. They are simply having a good time. Fraser meets Gorman at her level rather than trying to control their scenes, and she gives Mia a convincing mixture of stubbornness, humour and openness. When Mia notices another child without a parent present and asks Phillip to stand in for them too, her instinctive compassion becomes a lovely indication of what the relationship has taught her. Unfortunately, it also makes the inevitable discovery of the truth considerably harder to bear.
Kikuo, Memory and the Years We Cannot Get Back
The parallel story of Kikuo Hasegawa, an ageing former film actor played by Akira Emoto, affected me almost as much. Phillip is hired to play a journalist who is interested in Kikuo’s career, providing the old man with the attention and recognition he misses. Kikuo is living with dementia, and his recollections slide between confidence and confusion. He can seem closer to moments from decades ago than to people who have recently been standing right in front of him. Emoto understands how to make this painful without constantly advertising the pain, allowing humour and pride to survive alongside vulnerability.
Kikuo’s estrangement from his daughter Masami gives the storyline its deeper ache. With memory failing, the desire to return to the place where he grew up becomes more urgent, and Phillip eventually helps him make the journey despite the concerns of those responsible for his welfare. The countryside, the old tree and the buried photographs bring the past into focus for a brief time. I found that especially moving because getting older can make regret feel less like an abstract idea and more like a collection of conversations you failed to have while there was still time. There was a moment during this part of the film when my efforts to maintain composure in that aircraft seat began to look rather optimistic.
Brendan Fraser at His Quiet Best
A great deal has been written about Fraser’s career comeback, particularly since The Whale, but Rental Family is interesting for a less dramatic reason: it shows how little he needs to do to hold a scene. Phillip has a large physical presence but often behaves as though he is apologising for occupying the room. A hesitation, an uncertain smile or a slight shift in his expression communicates more than another actor’s carefully prepared monologue might achieve. Hikari trusts those moments, and the film is stronger for it.
There’s also a lovely continuity with the Fraser many of us knew from Encino Man, George of the Jungle and The Mummy. He could always play a big, bewildered fellow without making him seem stupid or cruel, and there is still something of that open-hearted quality here. Age and disappointment have altered the effect. Phillip is not a heroic figure suddenly discovering his destiny; he is an ordinary middle-aged man trying to work out whether the skills he has spent years developing still have a purpose. Fraser makes that quietly convincing.
The Other People Making a Living from Pretending
Takehiro Hira’s Shinji is an amusing counterweight to Phillip. He thinks in terms of contracts, clients and professional boundaries, and often sounds like the only adult in a room full of people getting carried away by their emotions. Yet the revelation that his own domestic arrangements are entangled with rented companionship makes his detachment seem less like superior wisdom and more like a defence mechanism. He knows how the service works because he understands the need for it all too well.
Mari Yamamoto’s Aiko exposes a much darker side of the agency. Her work sometimes requires her to impersonate a mistress so that unfaithful husbands can apologise while their wives direct their fury towards somebody they’ve been paid to blame. It is emotional labour pushed to the point of humiliation, and Yamamoto gives Aiko enough dignity and scepticism to stop the character becoming a passive victim. Kota, played by Bun Kimura, helps round out the small office community, where people employed to manufacture relationships seem to have quietly developed a makeshift family of their own. I would happily have spent more time with all three of them.
Kindness, Deception and the Things We Excuse
As warmly as the film treats Phillip, the work raises difficult questions. Mia believes her father has returned, and the longer that belief survives, the more thoroughly she invests in it. Her mother’s motives are understandable, but understandable motives don’t automatically make a decision harmless. When Phillip promises that he won’t abandon Mia, he is making a promise he isn’t in a position to guarantee. The affection may be real, but the arrangement still risks reopening precisely the wound it was designed to soothe.
Kikuo’s journey presents a similar problem. Taking an elderly man with dementia away from his usual care because you believe the trip will help him is compassionate in one sense, reckless in another. The film recognises the danger, and Phillip faces consequences, but it sometimes seems more willing to celebrate the impulse than examine its costs. I think that tension is essential to the story. If every kind gesture were necessarily the right thing to do, Rental Family would be much less interesting, and its central premise would amount to little more than a sentimental gimmick.
Hikari’s Tokyo and the People Behind the Film
Hikari, who directed 37 Seconds and episodes of Beef and Tokyo Vice, developed the original screenplay with Stephen Blahut. The relationship between Mia and Phillip has a particularly personal connection to her own childhood. Raised by a single mother, she has spoken about being told a story concerning her absent father and later discovering that the truth was rather different. It doesn’t mean this is an autobiographical film, but it helps explain why the script is less interested in exposing a lie than in understanding the frightened or protective person who tells it.
The film also benefits from Takurô Ishizaka’s cinematography and the unobtrusive work of the production-design and costume teams. Tokyo isn’t presented solely as a collection of neon signs and photogenic crossings. It is a city of small flats, ordinary streets, railway journeys and neighbours whose lives continue behind the windows Phillip passes every day. When the story travels beyond the city, the change in landscape feels connected to Kikuo’s memories rather than an excuse for pretty travel photography. The costumes are similarly unshowy; Phillip looks like a man wearing whatever happens to be in his wardrobe, which is almost certainly exactly the point.
The Music Knows When Not to Interfere
Jónsi and Alex Somers provide a score that understands the value of restraint. Their music has an airy, intimate quality, often supporting a feeling already present in a scene rather than arriving to tell us exactly when to be sad. That’s important in a film built around performances that rely on pauses, glances and conversational awkwardness. A less confident production could have submerged these moments beneath swelling piano and strings, desperate to make sure nobody missed the emotional significance.
Here, the music usually allows the characters a little breathing room. The gradual accumulation of tenderness is more effective than a succession of forced climaxes, and the pace means that the bigger emotional moments have somewhere to land. I liked the cherry blossoms, the quiet countryside and the modest interiors for similar reasons. They are beautiful without constantly underlining their own beauty, which is a rarer quality in contemporary filmmaking than it ought to be.
The Ending: The Funeral That Is No Longer a Performance
The final act brings Phillip’s two most significant relationships to a painful point of reckoning. His trip with Kikuo leads to an injury and accusations that he has taken the elderly man without proper permission, forcing the agency’s performers to use their professional skills in an unexpected attempt to help. Later, Kikuo dies, and Phillip attends his funeral. That moment answers the film’s strange opening assignment with a devastatingly simple difference: nobody is pretending this time. The grief belongs to the people in the room, including the man who began their relationship as a paid stranger.
Mia eventually learns who Phillip really is, and the truth hurts precisely because the relationship has come to mean so much to her. Their reconciliation doesn’t make the original deception acceptable, but it allows them to meet on more honest terms. Phillip cannot become the father she imagined, and the lie cannot be magically unwritten; the affection they developed, however, is still theirs. I appreciated that the ending makes room for a bond that changes its name rather than vanishing when the job finishes.
A Mirror Instead of a Grand Revelation
The film closes with Phillip visiting a shrine Kikuo had encouraged him to see. What he finds there is a mirror, not a wise old man handing him an answer or a supernatural sign spelling out his future. It’s a beautifully uncomplicated image for somebody who has spent so much time becoming what other people need: perhaps there is something worth recognising in the person he already is. The notion could sound unbearably neat if explained at length, but it arrives after enough sadness, humour and small kindnesses to feel earned.
What I take from the ending isn’t the idea that companionship fixes loneliness or that a good deed wipes away a bad decision. It is that a life can acquire meaning through things that don’t look much like professional success. Phillip doesn’t suddenly become a star or receive a triumphant industry award. He becomes someone whose presence matters to other people, and in recognising that, seems finally able to live a little more comfortably with himself.
Where the Film Is a Little Too Forgiving
I can see why a more sceptical viewer might find parts of Rental Family too reassuring. Phillip’s lapse in judgement with Kikuo has serious implications that the story resolves rather quickly, and the institutional questions surrounding Mia’s school admission and her mother’s deception never receive quite the scrutiny they deserve. Aiko’s assignments expose an ugly arrangement in which women can be paid to absorb the shame and anger owed to men, yet the film has limited time to examine what that work does to her.
These are meaningful weaknesses rather than minor technical complaints, though they didn’t undo the experience for me. Hikari has made a humane drama, not an investigative documentary about the rental-companionship industry, and she clearly prefers the complicated generosity of people to a final accounting of every moral failure. I usually have a low tolerance for films that insist humanity is wonderful while skimming past the evidence to the contrary. This one kept my trust because its characters were sufficiently flawed and its feelings sufficiently well observed.
Midlife, Reinvention and the Uses of What We Know
One of the things that stayed with me was Phillip’s sense of having reached an age when the profession he built his identity around no longer tells him who he is. Careers stall, industries move on and whatever you spent decades learning may stop producing the rewards you expected. The tempting response is to regard those years as wasted, or to cling stubbornly to the version of success you pictured when you were younger. Phillip discovers a more interesting possibility, though he hardly sets out to do so: a skill can find a new use even when the original ambition has lost its shine.
I like that the film does not turn this into a glossy story of personal reinvention. There is no montage of Phillip becoming astonishingly successful, no final audition that suddenly justifies every previous disappointment. Instead, he learns that being useful and being celebrated are not remotely the same thing. I think that is rather more believable, and ultimately more moving, than another film assuring us that the universe will eventually reward persistence with exactly the future we asked for.
Somewhere Above the Clouds
When Rental Family ended, the other passengers were still sleeping, eating or watching whatever had caught their attention on the entertainment system. The aircraft was carrying on with the unromantic business of getting everybody from one place to another, and I was trying to look as though I hadn’t just spent two hours becoming attached to an American actor, a small girl and an elderly Japanese man. There was something faintly ridiculous about being so affected in a setting that offered absolutely no privacy, but I suppose good films rarely consult our schedules before getting to us.
The acting was excellent, the pacing felt right and the story was beautiful without being particularly revolutionary. Its ideas about loneliness, regret, family and the need to belong are familiar, but the film gives them fresh life through people whose company I genuinely enjoyed. I watched it because I was a captive audience; I finished it because I didn’t want to leave them behind. As reasons for nearly crying on a plane go, I’ve had worse.
Production credits and further reading
Directed by Hikari; screenplay by Hikari and Stephen Blahut; cinematography by Takurô Ishizaka; music by Jónsi and Alex Somers. The film stars Brendan Fraser, Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto, Shannon Mahina Gorman and Akira Emoto. Searchlight’s official press gallery, the AFI Fest programme and an interview with Hikari provide further background.
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