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Shannon Gorman and Brendan Fraser in RENTAL FAMILY. Photo by James Lisle/Searchlight Pictures. © 2025 Searchlight Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

I always approach Hollywood films that depict Japan with a certain amount of trepidation. Memories of Rising Sun, The Last Samurai, and Memoirs of a Geisha continue to haunt my Japanese cinema-loving dreams. Cinephiles with similar trauma need not worry as they queue for a Rental Family screening. Here is a film that gets it right.

This is down to Hikari, the Japanese director and screenwriter behind the project. Her films include 37 Seconds and episodes of Tokyo Vice and Beef, and she clearly knows how to code-switch in order to create a film that will satisfy international audiences without caricaturing or fetishizing Japanese people and culture.

Set against modern-day Tokyo, the film follows Phillip (Brendan Fraser), an American actor who struggles to find work (and purpose) until he lands an unusual gig: working for a Japanese “rental family” agency, playing stand-in roles for strangers. Despite having lived for seven years in Japan, he is initially skeptical but begins to understand the significance of the service on offer.

One of his first tasks is to play the Canadian groom at a wedding. He is initially horrified and attempts to flee, but is soon engaged by the sincerity of all involved. After the ceremony, in the hotel room, the bride’s real partner appears. It is the woman she plans to marry and with whom she will move to Canada. The charade was necessary to give the bride the freedom to pursue the life and love she chooses while at the same time not disrupting the harmony with her parents and their more traditional views on marriage. Everyone understands the reality, but the superficial tatemae social niceties are honoured. Phillip begins to see the value of these “charades.”

Phillip’s next two jobs become the centre of the film: he is asked to be the returning “gaijin” father to a young girl (Shannon Gorman). Her mother feels her daughter needs this both emotionally and for the parents’ entrance interview to a prestigious school. Another role is to play a journalist interviewing a long-forgotten actor (Akira Emoto) as his memories and mental faculties fade.

As he immerses himself in his clients’ worlds, he begins to form genuine bonds that blur the lines between performance and reality. His bosses (Mari Yamamoto and Takehiro Hira) warn him against this, and the clients, the girl’s mother and the actor’s daughter, become concerned that this may invite unexpected damage.

Rental “people” are real in Japan: born of the demands from the complex interplay of social expectations, changing demographics, and individual needs. Themes of loneliness, social isolation and disconnection may be particularly evident in Japan, but they are certainly universal issues. It is also a theme that has been visited before in film, including Werner Herzog’s 2019 film, Family Romance, LLC.

The performances are strong throughout, but Fraser is the real revelation here, exuding a quiet sense of isolation, while his large, fleshy body is seemingly too big for every space he inhabits. His job is to fill emotional gaps in the fragmented lives of his clients, but he shares that need, and through his job at Rental Family, he rediscovers purpose, belonging, and the quiet beauty of human connection.

Hikari’s Rental Family, like its main protagonist, is big-hearted and sentimental, but also smart, humane, and easy to love—for audiences on both sides of the Pacific.

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