Rental Family

Rental Family (2025) is about an industry that genuinely exists in Japan: renting people. The business is not invented. Agencies in Japan rent clients a guest for a wedding, a colleague for a business meeting, a father for a child, a daughter for a woman living alone. Companies like Nihon Kokasei Honbu have operated for years. Phillip is an American actor in Tokyo without work. He starts taking jobs from one of these agencies. One day he is somebody's father, the next he is a grieving relative at a stranger's funeral. The question the film asks is whether a rented father is a fake one. If the child is genuinely happy and the man is genuinely there, where exactly is the line. The film does not answer easily, and at some point Phillip crosses it. This is Brendan Fraser's first major role after The Whale and he plays it in an entirely different register: quiet, embarrassed, light. The director, Hikari, is Japanese, and the film is a Japanese and American co-production that knows both sides from inside. That is why Tokyo never looks like a tourist brochure. It runs 110 minutes. Good for: quiet drama, films set in Japan, and stories about loneliness. Less good for: the sentiment rises in places, and some viewers find the resolution too neat.