It was a toothpaste commercial that brought Phillip Vandarpleog (Brendan Fraser) to Japan. That was seven years ago, and he’s been a working, if not struggling, actor since.

Fraser plays Phillip as a man stuck in second gear, his face scrunched with half-shrugs and swallowed emotions. Phillip is a lonely type. He has no friends to speak of, all family members are dead, and the only connection he has is with a call girl named Lola (Tamae Andô). His loneliness isn’t dangerous or toxic, just a void where an authentic connection should be. When he heads home to his studio apartment to eat supermarket sushi, Phillip looks out his window and smiles when he sees all the other families in the adjacent building filling their apartments with life and love. A married couple cooing at their child, an elderly man watching TV with amusement, a young couple getting ready to throw a party. They all look happy. Maybe it’s because not one of them has a smartphone in their hands.

This moment, which comes early in Rental Family, is an indication that what follows is sanitized. Directed by Hikari, Rental Family takes place in contemporary Japan, yet smart devices and siloed human existence—beyond Phillip—are curiously absent. Sure, when the narrative unfolds, it shows that everyone is lonely in their own way. But the reason behind the epidemic is either blamed obliquely as a societal problem specific to Japan or accepted without question. Rental Family is a sweet movie full of saccharine bromides with little interest in uncovering the causes or conditions of loneliness.

The lack of interrogation is curious considering that the gig Phillip takes for Rental Family, Inc. specializes in filling in the spaces society has created. Run by Tada (Takehiro Hira), Aiko (Mari Yamamoto), and Kota (Kimura Bun), Rental Family, Inc. offers clients a stand-in for every situation. Need a stunt groom so your parents don’t find out you’re gay? Rental Family to the rescue. Need a stand-in father because private schools won’t take the child of a single mother? Rental Family to the rescue. Have an ailing parent who feels the world has forgotten him? Rental Family will send out an actor pretending to be a journalist doing a legacy profile, and everything will be right as rain.

If Phillip—Rental Family’s “token white guy”—were a better actor, he might really dig into these characters, exercise his craft, and provide exactly what the client desires. But Phillip is too concerned with authenticity for someone who specializes in playacting. He gets cold feet, oversteps his boundaries, and feels mixed about his role. It’s possible Phillip was trained in the Method and takes his work seriously, but that backstory must be lying on Hikari’s cutting room floor. Judging by the professional output we see in Rental Family, Phillip is cut from the “Who am I this time?” cloth, and not the type who needs to believe his lines.

In another movie, Phillip straining against his moral compass might produce a good deal of drama and conflict. Not here. Rental Family is a movie so free of conflict that every piece of information revealed in the movie exists not to develop character or complicate narrative, but to be resolved. In most scenes, this resolution comes almost immediately, practically in the same shot. Others are more drawn out, but with no real suspense. When Rental Family rolls into the third act, Hikari and co-screenwriter Stephen Blahut tie up every last loose thread with no real sense of catharsis, just closure. When Phillip asks, “What’s in there?” midway through the movie, he gets his answer in the end. The reveal is so underwhelming that Phillip’s response is nothing more than “Huh.”

For the anxious moviegoer who cannot stand typical storytelling that withholds information for dramatic purposes, Rental Family must be a godsend. Too bad the movie had to scrub the drama in the process.  

Rental Family (2025)
Directed by Hikari
Screenplay by Hikari, Stephen Blahut
Produced by Hikari, Julia Lebedev, Eddie Vaisman, Shin Yamaguchi
Starring: Brendan Fraser, Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto, Kimura Bun, Tamae Andô, Akira Emoto
Searchlight Pictures, Rated PG-13, Running time 103 minutes, Premiered Sept. 6, 2025, at the Toronto International Film Festival

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