RENTAL FAMILY
(director/writer: Hikari; screenwriter: Stephen Blahut; cinematographer: Takuro Ishizaka; editors: Alan Baumgarten, Thomas A. Krueger; music: Jónsi & Alex Somers; cast: Brendan Fraser (Philip Vandarpleog), Takehiro Hira (Shinji), Shannon Mahina Gorman (Mia), Akira Emoto (Kikuo), Mari Yamamoto (Aiko), Shino Shinozaki (Mia’s Mother); Runtime: 103; MPAA Rating: PG-13; producers: Julia Lebedev, Hikari, Eddy Vaisman, Shin Yamaguchi; A Searchlight Pictures release; 2025-Japan/USA-in Japanese & English)
“The schlock story is disconcerting and bizarre.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Japanese filmmaker Hikari (“37 Seconds”) co-writes with Stephen Blahut and directs this well-crafted and well-acted but noxious feel-good drama about dealing with loneliness in a phony world in a caring way as an actor. It’s a gentle pic, whose overarching sentimentality and sugary take on life nevertheless left me unmoved by its superficiality and unsustainable pathos despite its sincere attempts to be sincere about its phoniness.
Philip Vandarpleog (Brendan Fraser) is a struggling American actor living in Tokyo for the past seven years after being in a TV toothpaste commercial. He speaks Japanese and is hired by Shinji (Takehiro Hira), who owns a rental family service he founded, to play a variety of roles as an absent white family member to promote their emotional healing. For instance, we see him play a “sad American” at a man’s staged funeral. In his latest gig, he plays the fake father to the biracial 11-year-old girl Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman). Her real father is absent and her single parent mom (Shino Shinozaki) feels she’s in need of a fatherly hug and of having a father with her will help her get into an elite private school by meeting with the selection committee. Mia doesn’t know he’s a fake, and he works hard to prove he’s her real father while being well-paid to do so.
The schlock story is disconcerting and bizarre, and the good it does is based on a business transaction whose aim is to fool people into thinking everything is kosher about their relationships. That Japan actually has business operations such as this one (check out the Werner Herzog 2019 doc “Family Romance, LIC”) leaves me roughly comparing it in a way to the services prostitutes provide (which is a business transaction).
Fraser has perhaps reached his acting heights with this exasperatingly manipulative role, one in which he so generously plays such a fake sympathetic role without seemingly having his integrity compromised even if he’s compromised as a phony.
It played at the Toronto Film Festival.
REVIEWED ON 9/21/2025 GRADE: C+
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