Rental Family

The Architecture of Affection

I can’t stop thinking about how Brendan Fraser takes up space. In *Rental Family*, Hikari’s 2025 dramedy about commodified connection, he plays Phillip Vanderploeg, a washed-up American actor drifting through Tokyo. Fraser is a big guy, and Hikari frames him against cramped apartments and low doorways so he always looks a little too large for the room. It starts as a quiet visual gag and then turns sour, into something sadder: a man who simply doesn’t fit.

The “lonely expat in Tokyo” story usually comes drenched in neon and moody synth. Hikari wants none of that. Her Tokyo is gray, loud, and transactional. Phillip, scrambling for work after spending seven years living off the fumes of a single toothpaste commercial, falls into a job at a “rental family” agency run by the practical Shinji (Takehiro Hira). The idea sounds absurd, but it’s also real—these agencies exist, letting clients hire actors to play missing fathers, fake spouses, even grieving relatives to preserve face in a culture tightly bound by social decorum. It’s such an odd premise. (I honestly assumed it was surrealist invention until a quick Google search said otherwise.)



The movie’s smartest move is refusing to sneer at the people buying the illusion. When Phillip is hired by a single mother to play an “American dad” for her daughter Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman) so she can get into an elite private school, the lie is purely functional. But watching Fraser fine-tune the performance—how much warmth is the correct amount when you’re pretending?—is subtle physical comedy that keeps sliding into heartbreak. There’s a scene at a crosswalk where Mia takes his hand. You can see panic hit first, then this quiet, hungry relief settle in. He doesn’t just hold on—his shoulders drop, like he’s finally got something to lean on.

Fraser’s late-career resurgence has been wild to watch. After *The Whale*, we know he can carry heavy tragedy, but here he uses that golden-retriever gentleness in a way that hurts. IndieWire’s David Ehrlich put it well, noting that "Fraser plays every scene in Rental Family as if he's suffering from a pain that he doesn't know how to disguise." His Japanese is awkward in conversation, which feels right for someone who’s lived there nearly a decade and still hasn’t unpacked what’s actually wrong.



Hikari—who’s directed episodes of *Beef* and the excellent indie *37 Seconds*—brings something unmistakably personal to the script. (Her father left when she was an infant, and you can feel the story wrestling with the shadow of absent parents.) She also doesn’t dodge the uglier side of the business. Phillip’s coworker Aiko (Mari Yamamoto) is often hired as the “other woman” in staged infidelity apologies, and she endures real physical abuse from furious wives. I’m not sure the film always finds the right balance between Aiko’s bleak reality and Phillip’s softer path toward self-understanding; sometimes the tonal shift hits like a speed bump at sixty.

Still, the high point is Phillip’s scenes with Kikuo (Akira Emoto), an aging actor with dementia whose family hires Phillip to pose as an interviewing journalist just to keep him engaged. Emoto is incredible—he can suggest a lifetime of regret with nothing more than the way he looks into a teacup. The two men sit across from each other, one pretending to care, the other losing his grip on who he is, and somehow they stumble into something genuine.



You could call *Rental Family* a comedy about depression or a tragedy that happens to be funny, depending on where you’re standing. It doesn’t tie things up neatly. Nobody gets “fixed” by the credits. But it does land on a quiet, decent idea: even a relationship that starts as a transaction can leave a real mark. Sometimes, acting like you care is how you remember how to do it for real.