RENTAL FAMILY

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Storyline (warning: spoilers)

We are served quite the dicey premise in the Tokyo-set Rental Family, and thanks to Hikari’s elegant direction, this is a beautiful and contemplative film, with lovely messaging and a couple of sly twists. Rental Family is inspired by real-life businesses that enable clients to literally rent out actors to portray wedding guests, estranged parents, romantic partners, etc.
Brendan Fraser is Phillip Vandarploueg, a middle-aged actor who moved to Japan to star in a toothpaste commercial seven years ago, subsequently appeared in a string of second-rate productions and is now struggling to find work. Phillip has tried to assimilate and has become fluent in Japanese. Still, we get the distinct feeling he has stayed here because there’s no one back in America who cares if he ever returns. Phillip lands a gig with a rental family business and at first, his jobs are relatively straightforward and mainly played for laughs, and the deception baked into the various gigs is for a greater good.
Eventually, Phillip is hired for two jobs that present serious moral quandaries. He poses as a journalist writing a magazine piece on a legendary but largely forgotten actor named Kikuo, who is beginning to lose his memory. He is hired by a single mother to play the father of a daughter he’s never met to increase her chances of gaining admission to a prestigious middle school. We’re immediately troubled by the notion of a mother hiring someone to play her daughter’s dad, if only for a few weeks. To Hikari’s great credit, Rental Family acknowledges the troubling nature of this gig, as Phillip finds himself in a seemingly impossible situation that could easily turn into something with cruel and lasting consequences.
Rental Family is a thoughtful and insightful presentation of this unique and admittedly strange business of renting humans to help other humans. For Phillip, the task is figuring out what to do when the lies must stop and truth awaits him at every turn.