Rental Family (2025)
Brendan Fraser has been experiencing a career renaissance in the 2020s, even winning an Oscar for The Whale. His new film Rental Family, from the Japanese director Hikari, is a moving exploration of loneliness and the need for human connection.
Fraser plays Philip, a down-on-his-luck actor in Tokyo doing commercials. He gets a gig with an agency that rents out actors to play various roles in clients' lives (best friend, husband, father, etc.). The most prominently featured clients in this story are a young girl (Shannon Gorman) whose mother has led her to believe Philip is really her father and an elderly actor (Akira Emoto) whose family asks Philip to pretend to be a journalist profiling him.
While Philip's boss (Takehiro Hira) pitches the work as filling an emotional void in clients lives and giving them a measure of peace, there is a dark side to the work. Philip's female coworker (Mari Yamamoto) is often asked to play the role of a mistress apologizing to the wife of a philandering husband.
Rental Family is fundamentally an exploration of loneliness. Everyone in the film, including the actors at the rental family agency, is lonely. For Philip, the work allows him not only to help his clients but to form connections he has also otherwise been lacking in his life. The movie underlines that connection of any form is important in an often impersonal world.
Fraser
does an excellent job as the lead. He conveys a sense of underlying warmth and
decency, as well as his character's underlying sadness and loneliness without
ever overplaying it. Armchair travelers will also enjoy the exploration of
Japanese culture (Tokyo is beautifully photographed here).
