OUT NOW: Rental Family (Hikari, 2025)

Struggling actor Philip (Brendan Fraser) is hired for a company that specialises in a very specific kind of performance: actors playing roles in clients' lives - from friends to lovers to family members.

Most of the people are lonely and are looking for company; others are looking for someone to take a more active role. 

As he struggles with the impact he is having on strangers' lives, Philip finds himself forced to confront the absences in his own life...

I really enjoyed this movie. I watched it last month, thinking it would make a nice break from all the action movies from last year, but then I didn’t feel motivated enough to polish it.

I left the movie having enjoyed it, but distrusted my own feelings. Mostly because it is a story set in Japan centred around a white man. Is he a saviour figure?

It feels reductive to think of the movie this way, but I also do not want to discount it.

The other question I had was about Brendan Fraser.

It is impossible not to see in Phillip’s redemption, Fraser’s own comeback story. 

With his big eyes and open face, Fraser is a great anchor for this movie. He brings a tired, understated sense of loss.

In an early scene, he looks out at the apartment windows opposite his room, at the glimpses of other lives - people meeting friends and lovers. While he is a gaijin, an outsider, it is clear Philip’s loneliness is more than just cultural.

He holds the screen but his is not an overwhelming presence - while not a true ensemble piece, he does not overwhelm the rest of the cast.

The story structure is familiar: 

The different clients lead to Philip recognising aspects missing from his own life - he sees these clients as chances to make up for something that is missing in himself.

One of the most intriguing - although understated - elements of the film is Philip’s interactions with a sex worker. She appears in only a few scenes but the parallels are obvious - she is providing a specific kind of intimacy that he cannot find elsewhere. She knows his role better than he does.

To the movie’s credit, it avoids the obvious route of making her a love interest. But it feels like the movie is teasing a theme more than expanding on it.

The key relationships Phil has are with a movie star (Akira Emoto) who is struggling with a lack of purpose and dementia, and a young girl (Shannon Mahina Gorman) in need of a father figure to get into an exclusive private school.

The former forces Phillip to confront the ghost of his father, and his own struggles toward autonomy, while the latter forces him to accept new kinds of responsibility.

Both relationships force Phillip to step outside of himself, and to subordinate himself to the good of the people he is supporting. This is the aspect of the film that endeared it to me, and Fraser’s screen persona is so malleable and empathetic that it works. 

A lovely little film.  

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you enjoy something I wrote, and want to support my writing, here’s a link for tips!