Rental Family (2025)

3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Seem Job

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Phillip Vandarploeug (Brendan Fraser) is an actor living in Tokyo. He is best known for playing a superhero in a toothpaste commercial, but has struggled to land any meaningful work. His agent calls him with a strange job, to be a mourner at a funeral. To his surprise, it's not a funeral at all, but rather a kind of service that someone paid for. The company owner, Shinji (Takehiro Hira), offers him a full time job. He is hired to marry a young woman, and to pretend to interview an aging movie star, and, more memorably, to play "dad" to a young girl. Needless to say, he gets swept up in these imaginations, never in false ways, but in ways that suggest how emotions can be unpredictable and uncontrollable. Another employee (Mari Yamamoto) performs "apology" jobs, wherein she pretends to be a man's mistress, letting wives know that the relationship was her fault and is now over. Writer/director Hikari gives Rental Family a tender touch, moving leisurely through the story (though I feel like it could have slowed down even more). For a story about lying — and rental families are actually a thing in Japan — the film stays emotionally and logically true; characters are smart and try to do the right thing.