‘Rental Family’ Review: A Soft-Edged Cross-Cultural Tale of Reinvention

Seven years have not been enough for Philip to fully grasp Japanese culture. He speaks the language reasonably well and lives much like a local—alone in a small apartment inside a massive housing complex, eating dinners picked up at the nearby 7-Eleven—but there are things he simply cannot wrap his head around, no matter how hard he tries. Played by Brendan Fraser, Philip is an American actor who came to Tokyo years earlier to appear in a commercial and never left. Once his brief moment of fame faded, so did the job offers. Now he drifts from casting call to casting call, competing for the few roles available to foreigners, with little success. Until, out of financial necessity, he accepts a strange offer he cannot refuse—one that will end up changing his life in unexpected ways.

This Japanese–American co-production is based both on real events and on a “mock documentary” about the same story directed some years ago by Werner Herzog. In its logic, aesthetics, and narrative approach, Rental Family brings together cinematic traditions from both countries. Its tone often recalls the intimate, family-centered dramas common in Japanese cinema, while at the same time revealing a certain Western inflection in its storytelling—somewhat akin, though less successfully, to what Wim Wenders attempted in Perfect Days.

In a surprising and often amusing turn, Philip stumbles upon a company called Rental Family, which hires actors to play whatever roles their clients require. Sometimes the requests are relatively ordinary—mourners at a funeral, or even a rehearsal for one—but others are far more elaborate. These can range from one-off assignments to long-term contracts that force the actors to lead lives that run parallel to their own. Philip is initially baffled by the concept and suspects a scam, but his boss, Shinji (Takehiro Hira, from Shōgun), assures him that many Japanese people would rather resort to such arrangements than confront a painful truth head-on.

After some hesitation, Philip finds himself more than satisfied with his first job, in which he is hired to play the groom at a woman’s wedding. She is a lesbian with a long-term partner but wants a traditional ceremony to please her parents, and Philip—described by others as “the sad American,” a label perfectly matched by Fraser’s expressive face—steps into the role. In the end, he comes to accept the convoluted logic of the situation, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Los simuladores, Damián Szifron’s Argentine series. Not all clients, however, have such benign—or appropriate—motives, and navigating that moral gray area becomes part of the job for Philip and his coworkers.

The film unfolds along three main threads: two tied to Philip’s work, and one focused on his personal life and that of his colleagues at the company. In one assignment, Philip must pretend to be the American father of a half-Japanese girl whose mother is trying to enroll her in an expensive private school. Since the girl has never met her father, Philip poses as him to ease her anxiety and to help secure her admission to a school that does not accept single or divorced mothers. The second job pairs him with Kikuo Hasegawa (Akira Emoto), an elderly actor on the verge of senile dementia. Philip impersonates a journalist sent to interview Hasegawa about his career—a scheme devised by the man’s daughter, who wants her father to have a dignified, happy sense of closure. Both experiences, inevitably, come with their share of surprises, small joys, disappointments, and life lessons.

Amid this constant role-playing—evoking, at times, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life—the Japan-born, U.S.-based director probes what Westerners often perceive as the oddities or peculiarities of Japanese culture. The result is both a portrait of that society and a study of its protagonist: a man caught between two worlds, suspended between a troubled past, a precarious present, and a future that remains a complete unknown. Somewhat unexpectedly, Rental Family also weaves Buddhist elements into the characters’ lives, though more as a colorful detail than an emotionally resonant one.

The film continually walks a fine line, trying to avoid cultural tourism without ever fully escaping it. It is a gentle, kind-hearted movie, marked by the steady blend of comedy and drama so typical of certain strands of Japanese cinema, here filtered through a foreign protagonist who serves as the audience’s stand-in within this often bewildering web of human relationships. Thanks largely to Fraser’s warm presence—his sad, slightly melancholic gaze perfectly aligned with the director’s intentions—the film holds together. Even as Philip faces difficult, uncomfortable, and occasionally dangerous situations, it is clear that his journey is ultimately one of personal rediscovery. Fraser, fresh off The Whale, carries the emotional weight of the film on his broad shoulders. He does not turn it into a masterpiece, but he does rescue it from the cloying sentimentality it might easily have fallen into.