Publication Date: 11-28-2025

Rental Family (2025) review

Dir. Hikari

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★½

Hikari’s Rental Family is inspired by the actual business of renting individuals to serve roles in your life. Popular in Japan, but found even in the United States, actors can be hired to portray wedding guests, parents, dates, companions, and more. It’s different from what’s known in sex work as the “girlfriend/boyfriend experience,” but we’ve seen the subject tackled in films such as Werner Herzog’s Family Romance, LLC and the Ben Affleck/James Gandolfini holiday comedy Surviving Christmas.

With Rental Family co-writer/director Hikari — who directed multiple episodes of the acclaimed A24 television series Beef — gives the material the legitimacy and many variables it needs to be a complete, moving picture.

Phillip Vandarploueg (Brendan Fraser) is a middle-aged actor, who came to Japan to star in a toothpaste commercial some-seven years ago. He’s stayed in the country finding a barrage of one-off work in two-bit productions, still awaiting his big break that he now fears will never come. He’s a lot like Bill Murray’s Bob Harris in Lost in Translation, but at least Bob was an accomplished actor.

Phillip has mostly assimilated in Japan. Fluent in Japanese and able to afford a cozy high-rise apartment, he entertains himself in the evening by watching the lives of residents in the building across the street. He raises his beverage to toast the folks who have successfully put the baby to bed, or another couple enjoying their own intimate date.

Phillip winds up stumbling into a gig with a rental family business run by Shinji (Takehiro Hira in an efficient, and eventually multilayered, performance). Initially, his assignments are linear and comparatively simple. He is a “sad American” at a man’s mock-funeral, and later, a husband in a woman’s wedding designed to fool her parents. In time, Phillip is hired for two gigs that are more morally opaque. The one involves him impersonating a journalist writing a piece on a retired actor named Kikuo (Akira Emoto), who is starting to succumb to early onset dementia. The other sees him hired by a single mother (Shino Shinozaki) to play the father of her 11-year-old daughter, Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman), whom she has never met. The ruse is designed to get Mia accepted into a prestigious middle school — one of those that maps out the child’s life before they can even figure out who they are or want to be.

You don’t have to be an ethicist to see how problematic the latter arrangement is. It’s as if Mia’s mother didn’t consider the fact that Phillip would have to excuse himself from her young daughter’s life after the school interview is complete, leaving her scarred and with trust issues that will last a lifetime. Hikari and co-writer Stephen Blahut do a sufficient job at painting this gig for what it is: troubling and cruel. When Mia’s initial disdain for the man she believes to be her father — because her mother tells her he is — both her and Phillip bond in very touching ways that render us heartbroken on-site because we know they won’t last. Phillip also starts to struggle with the gig, realizing the lasting consequences this will have on the child.

Kikuo’s story is a justifiable one, especially for Phillip, who must go along with it. That is, until Kikuo begins to confide in Phillip about his misdeeds as a father, and later expresses a desire to travel to his hometown before his death. Kikuo’s daughter doesn’t want him leaving the house, leaving Phillip in another quandary about how to balance a subject’s wishes when he, himself, is merely an actor.

So many Tokyo-set films are set at night so the bright, neon lights in the city can pulsate and create noir vibes. Hikari and cinematographer Takurô Ishizaka capture the bustling city in the daylight, where it’s rife with activity, but also quiet with tranquility in more remote areas such as gardens. This is a lavishly shot movie with a lived-in setting, amiable characters, and a gamut of emotions that arise. By the time the credits roll, you almost have to remind yourself you didn’t just live this story.

Brendan Fraser is so resonant in Rental Family that it’s frustrating to think all the energy and Oscar buzz went towards his work in The Whale, a downright cruel and remarkably insensitive movie. He’s the rare actor who wears his heart-on-his-sleeve in a manner that sidesteps all emotional manipulation. He’s as earnest as they come, with an expressive face that rests in a way that conveys kindness and genuine human empathy. Fraser is one of the best we’ve got right now, and it’s a treat to have him back, in a healthy, happy state of mind.

I was also taken by Akira Emoto, whose role as Kikuo grows to make you believe he’s a veteran actor with desperately little to show for it. When Emoto’s subplot was first introduced, I feared that it would distract from the complex handling of Phillip’s relationship with Mia. Quite the contrary. Not only does it force the audience to juggle multiple perspectives in a way that reflects Phillip being required to play multiple roles, Kikuo’s story develops into some genuinely affecting stretches, such as when the two men spend time together and he tells Phillip, in devastating fashion: “I want to see her one more time before I forget.”

There’s so much to love about Rental Family as it sweeps you off your feet with an original, engaging story predicated on human interest and the complexities of interpersonal relationships where the lines between authenticity and artificiality are blurred. Fraser has done so much phenomenal work that it’s getting redundant to say, yet again, how eminently natural he is. Hikari and Blahut make beautiful, lyrical music with a movie that’s not afraid to get sentimental. Why would it? It moves with both confidence and grace, and earns its emotional beats as it wins you over.

Starring: Brendan Fraser, Takehiro Hira, Shannon Mahina Gorman, Akira Emoto, Mari Yamamoto, and Kimura Bun. Directed by: Hikari.