Rental Family
Brendan Fraser plays a guest-for-hire in Hikari’s unusual, thought-provoking parable about role-playing in Japan.
Groom for a day: Misato Morita and Brendan Fraser.
Photo courtesy of Walt Disney Studios.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
In our way, we are all playing roles. But for Phillip Vanderploeg, an American actor who has chosen to live in Japan, he is hired to play real people, without a script. At first he is just given stand-in roles – such as a mourner at a funeral – but then the parts get bigger. He has his reservations about this new career path, but he needs the money and, after marrying a Japanese lesbian, he starts to feel his feet. Then he is asked to pretend to be a journalist chronicling the career of an ageing actor with dementia, as well as the father of an eleven-year-old girl, Mia, to help aid her passage into an exclusive private school…
In this homogenised world, it’s always a shock to stumble across a culture so different to our own, and in Japan, rental families are a real thing and are growing in popularity. There are all sorts of reasons for paying a stranger to step into a designated social position for a limited time, often to save face, and Phillip Vanderploeg is the token white American for Rental Family Inc. On one level, Phillip is just fulfilling other people’s dreams, on another he is peddling artifice – and deception. There’s a thin line between make-believe and outright lying, but if the end result brings people happiness, where’s the harm? It’s a question that is coming to haunt Phillip Vanderploeg.
Brendan Fraser has had an unusual career as a movie star, from comic actor to action hero and then as an Oscar-winning heavyweight with his extraordinary performance in Darren Aronofsky’s gut-wrenching The Whale. Here, his considerable physical heft makes for a neat counterpoint to the miniaturised world of Japan, which Phillip has still to fully comprehend after seven years in Tokyo. His ungainly discomfort, too, is magnified by his new surroundings, while Fraser’s boyish facial features bring a touching nuance to a man finding himself increasingly out of his emotional depth.
The writer-director Hikari (37 Seconds), who co-scripted with Stephen Blahut, has yet to develop a distinctive directorial style, but has extracted likeable, convincing performances from her cast, allowing the power of the story to gather momentum as it goes along. The film feels mainstream enough to trick us into believing we know where it’s going, and then drops surprises into the mix. It’s a thought-provoking contemplation of Japan today, of a society increasingly distancing itself from real emotion, safeguarding itself with tradition and social etiquette. And then in walks a big demonstrative American…
Cast: Brendan Fraser, Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto, Shannon Mahina Gorman, Akira Emoto, Shino Shinozaki, Kimura Bun, Sei Matobu, Misato Morita.
Dir Hikari, Pro Eddie Vaisman, Julia Lebedev, Hikari and Shin Yamaguchi, Ex Pro Stephen Blahut, Oren Moverman, Brendan Fraser and Leonid Lebedev, Screenplay Hikari and Stephen Blahut, Ph Takurô Ishizaka, Pro Des Norihiro Isoda and Masako Takayama, Ed Alan Baumgarten and Thomas A. Krueger, Music Jónsi and Alex Somers, Costumes Meg Mochizuki, Sound Kevin Senzaki and Sung Rok Choi.
Sight Unseen Productions/Domo Arigato Productions-Walt Disney Studios.
109 mins. Japan/USA. 2025. US Rel: 21 November 2025. UK Rel: 16 January 2026. Cert. 12A.
