‘Rental Family’ review: Brendan Fraser gets emotionally reimbursed

The Oscar-winner stars in HIKARI’s Rental Family, a tender Tokyo dramedy about quiet connections and finding purpose in unexpected places.

Rental Family really is the kind of movie that sneaks up on you, even if you know going in that you’re likely to love it. Sort of like a song in a minor key that’s gentle, a little melancholy, and somehow exactly what you needed to hear. It’s not reinventing cinema, of course, and it knows it. This is instead a small, sincerely played dramedy about lonely people renting each other’s company. But it’s also one of the most quietly satisfying feel-good films of the year, anchored by Brendan Fraser giving exactly the kind of open-hearted, deeply silly, deeply tender performance that made everyone fall in love with him in the first place.

The premise has a high-concept hook, but HIKARI plays it with a soft touch. Fraser’s Phillip Vandarpleog is an American actor living in Tokyo, long past the glory days of a toothpaste commercial and now just sort of drifting. When we meet him, he’s stuck between acting gigs and going through the motions until he stumbles into a last-minute job that sounds like crowd work and turns out to be a rehearsal funeral. From there, Phillip is recruited by a “rental family” agency, which is a business that dispatches actors to play whatever role a client needs filled. These include fake mistresses, overbearing bosses, doting fathers, and anonymous mourners. It’s gig work for the soul, and Phillip is just desperate enough to try it and decent enough to get caught up in it.

Fake relatives, real feelings.

HIKARI’s work on this is quite impressive. The empathy and everyday specificity of her debut 37 Seconds and her TV work on Beef and Tokyo Vice, drops Phillip into a Tokyo that feels lived-in rather than touristed, while never pretending the tourism factor isn’t there.

Takehiro Hira’s Shinji, the agency owner, plays like the world’s most exhausted dungeon master, calmly assigning emotional side quests while hiding his own vulnerabilities. Mari Yamamoto’s Aiko is the sharp, guarded colleague who understands both the power and danger of this work. Akira Emoto turns up as Kikuo, an aging actor whose memory is slipping but whose pride is very much intact, and he walks away with entire stretches of the film just by breathing his presence into every scene. There’s also newcomer Shannon Gorman as Mia, a young girl whose single mother hires Phillip to pass as the dad she’s never had. It’s the sort of role that could’ve curdled into cute-for-hire, but Gorman is so present and prickly that she feels like a real-life kid, fittingly enough, rather than a screenwriting device.

A contractual family affair.

What HIKARI is really after here isn’t a culture-clash comedy so much as a cross-cultural study of performance and longing. The rental-family industry in Japan, which really does exist in various forms, grew organically out of a perfect storm of urban isolation, rigid social expectations, and limited access to mental health support. So Rental Family uses that backdrop to ask a deceptively simple question. If the role you’re playing gives someone real comfort, does it matter that it’s “fake”?

The answer is never explicit, nor is it a thesis statement. But rather, it comes through a series of small, carefully observed encounters, each as engaging as the last and that’s no small feat. In that way, the film keeps circling the same idea from different angles. That is, it tackles intimacy as a shared hallucination we agree to maintain because the alternative is unbearable.

Subscribing to human connection.

On that front, the movie works beautifully. Fraser plays Phillip as a big, shambling conduit for other people’s needs, the kind of guy who will absolutely cry at your dad’s fake funeral even though you only paid him to clap. There’s a looseness to his work here that feels different from the operatic misery of The Whale (the less said about that disaster, the better). This film is more in the vein of his George of the Jungle and The Mummy era charm, just aged and scuffed by life and sanded down from the easy gags.

To that end, HIKARI and co-writer Stephen Blahut sketch the episodic structure with a light hand, giving each client subplot enough room to land without turning the movie into a glorified anthology or pretentious mosaic. Jon Thor Birgisson (We Bought a Zoo) and Alex Somers’ (Causeway) score hums underneath like a gentle radio signal from another planet with just enough shimmer to make the emotions feel slightly heightened without tipping into whimsy overload.

And crucially, the film’s treatment of Japanese culture feels grounded and specific at just about all times. You’re never watching “wacky Japan” through a boggled American gaze, but rather a Japanese filmmaker using a Western lead as one prism among many.

Side quests of the soul.

Again, Rental Family isn’t some towering masterpiece of moral ambiguity, nor is it trying to be. If you want a kitchen-sink interrogation of consent, labor, and deception in the gig economy, this is more chamomile tea than double espresso. The ethical knots of the work, particularly in the Mia storyline where Phillip must decide how far to lean into pretending to be a father, are bittersweet complications rather than true deal-breakers.

Certain beats resolve a little too tidily, and a late-film choice involving Kikuo feels engineered to wring a specific reaction rather than emerging organically from the mess the movie otherwise embraces. The screenplay occasionally defaults to familiar “rediscovering purpose abroad” rhythms, and you can see some of the turns coming a mile down the Shibuya crossing. Still, there’s something honest about that modesty. This is a film content to be a generous hang rather than a grand statement at the height of awards season.

The bottom line.

In the end, that aforementioned modesty is part of what audiences will probably love the most out of this one. Rental Family plays its gentle minor key on purpose, letting its best moments sneak up in throwaway gestures and quiet train rides and admittedly predictable dramatic turns. In a year clogged with loud, IP-drunk spectacles insisting they’re about “found family,” it’s refreshing to see a movie about a literal found family, or collection of them, that actually believes human connection is sacred, even when it’s scheduled by the hour.

Fraser remains an absolute gift, HIKARI continues to cement herself as one of the most empathetic filmmakers working today, and together they’ve made a film that may not change the world, but might nudge you to text your mom and at least look twice at the stranger sitting across from you on the train. For a feel-good crowd-pleaser this quietly assured, that’s more than enough reason to rent out a seat or two in the theater.

Rental Family opens in theaters on November 21. Watch the trailer here.

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Images courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.