In an age when genuine human connection seems to require a subscription fee and two-factor authentication, along comes Rental Family, a film that dares to ask the question: what if you could simply hire someone to pretend they love you? It's a premise straight out of Japan's more eccentric service industries – the sort of thing that makes you wonder whether loneliness has become so acute that even the pretence of family now comes with an hourly rate and a non-disclosure agreement. Directed by Hikari, who co-wrote the script with Stephen Blahut, this 2026 offering stars Brendan Fraser as an American actor adrift in Tokyo, reduced to renting himself out as surrogate kin. One might have expected a bleak satire along the lines of Werner Herzog brooding over a vending machine, but what we get instead is something far gentler: a dramedy that wants to hug you, even if it occasionally squeezes a little too hard.
Fraser plays Phillip Vanderploeg, a once-promising thespian whose career peaked with a toothpaste commercial seven years earlier – the kind of gig that pays the rent but leaves the soul wondering whether it has been whitened or merely bleached. Desperate for work, he joins a company that supplies stand-in relatives for clients too embarrassed or estranged to produce the real thing. Weddings without fiancés, school interviews without fathers, even quiet companionship for the elderly: it's all on the menu, served with professional detachment. Fraser, that great lumbering bear of a man who has lately reminded us why we fell for him in the first place, brings a wounded gravitas to the role. He is by turns bewildered, tender, and quietly furious, his eyes doing the heavy lifting whenever the script threatens to lighten the load. This is Fraser in full post-The Whale renaissance mode, and the film is inconceivable without him. One watches him forge tentative bonds with a young girl who needs a father figure and an ageing actor slipping into dementia, and one believes every hesitant smile. It is, dare one say it, Oscar-adjacent work, though in these cynical times that phrase has begun to sound like a threat rather than a promise.
The supporting cast is uniformly excellent, a reminder that Japanese actors have long mastered the art of conveying volumes with a flicker of restraint. Takehiro Hira as the rental agency's proprietor brings a weary pragmatism that anchors the film's more whimsical flights; Mari Yamamoto as Fraser's colleague offers a sharp, knowing counterpoint; and young Shannon Mahina Gorman, as the half-Japanese girl who gradually thaws towards her hired dad, delivers a performance of such natural poise that one suspects child labour laws were rewritten just for her. Even the venerable Akira Emoto, as the dementia-stricken former star, manages to be heart-breaking without ever tipping into caricature. Hikari directs them all with a sure hand, allowing silences to do the talking and trusting the audience to keep up.
Visually, the film is a quiet triumph. Cinematographer Takurô Ishizaka captures Tokyo not as the neon overload of tourist fantasies but as a city of intimate spaces: cramped apartments, empty shrines, rain-slicked streets at dusk. The camera lingers on faces in close-up, catching the micro-expressions that betray the gap between performance and feeling, while wider shots frame characters against the vast indifference of urban life. It's understated work, never flashy, yet it gives the film a texture that elevates it above mere feel-good fare. Jónsi and Alex Somers' score, all shimmering atmospherics and plaintive strings, complements this perfectly – though one does occasionally wish someone had told them that less can indeed be more.
The story itself is cleverly constructed, weaving together several rental assignments into a mosaic of modern isolation. It explores the blurred line between acting and authenticity with more nuance than one might expect from a film that ultimately wants to reassure us that human connection is still possible, even if it starts with a contract. There are moments of genuine insight here – particularly in the way the film acknowledges the emotional toll on the renters themselves – and a satirical edge that pricks without drawing too much blood.
Yet herein lies the film's one noticeable flaw: a tendency to lean rather heavily on the sentimental accelerator. For all its restraint elsewhere, Rental Family cannot resist the occasional plunge into outright heart-tugging, complete with swelling music and reconciliations that arrive with the neatness of a PowerPoint conclusion. One scene in particular, involving a clandestine trip to a childhood home and a conveniently unearthed time capsule, threatens to tip the enterprise into the territory of those airport novels one pretends not to read. It's not that the emotion feels unearned – Fraser ensures that it doesn't – but rather that it arrives gift-wrapped when a subtler presentation might have sufficed. In its weaker moments, the film seems to fear that we might leave the cinema unmoved, and so it reaches for the emotional defibrillator when a gentle nudge would have done.
Still, these are quibbles. Rental Family is, in the end, a warm, intelligent piece of entertainment that treats its characters with respect, and its audience with something approaching trust. In a cinematic landscape increasingly dominated by explosions and superheroes, here is a film content to explore quieter devastations and smaller triumphs. Brendan Fraser, in particular, reminds us what a proper movie star looks like when given proper material. One leaves the theatre feeling, against all odds, mildly optimistic about the human condition – or at least about the possibility of renting a better version of it for a couple of hours.