(Part 1)
Rental Family:
A Film That Sees Clearly But Not Far Enough
Rental Family is a 2025 Japanese-American drama directed by Hikari and co-written with Stephen Blahut. Brendan Fraser is back as Phillip Vanderploeg. Not with a superhero suit or a blockbuster franchise. He is back with something harder to pull off: a quiet, aching film about loneliness and the strange lengths people go to escape it. Rental Family is set in Tokyo and follows Fraser’s character Phillip, an out-of-work American actor who finds himself employed by a “rental family” agency. His job is to play stand-in relatives and companions for clients in need of emotional support or social appearances.
The premise sounds absurd. It is not. In Japan, rental family agencies are real. They have existed since the early 1990s. Clients hire actors to appear as husbands at weddings, as fathers at school events, as friends at dinners. The reasons are private and varied. Social stigma. Crushing loneliness. The gap left by a micro-family that simply cannot fill every human need. The film takes all of this seriously, and that seriousness is what makes it worth watching.
Comedy-Drama?
Fraser is wonderful here. His physical presence in Tokyo is the film’s most honest source of comedy. A six-foot American in a city where everything is designed for someone smaller creates a natural, gentle absurdity. He bumps into things. He folds himself into small spaces. The humor is never mean. It is simply true. And underneath that surface warmth, Fraser plays Phillip with real emotional intelligence. He is a man who is good at pretending to care, and who slowly discovers he actually does.
The film makes a crucial distinction that most viewers will feel before they can name it. Short-term rental roles work. A stranger hired to attend a funeral, to smile at a school play, to fill an empty chair at a dinner table because these cause no lasting harm. The transaction is clean and the need is genuinely met. Fraser’s compassion in these moments feels real because compassion in bounded, temporary encounters is entirely possible, even when it is paid for.
But the film is equally honest about what does not work. When roles persist over months, when a “rental father” keeps returning week after week, the performance cannot hold its shape. Clients begin expecting what no contract can deliver. Real history. Real loyalty. Real love. The illusion cracks under the weight of what it was never designed to carry. Watch the movie to discover how the agency changes its policy for these larger, sustained emotional roles. That is the film’s most truthful and most painful moment.
So far, so good. Hikari has made a compassionate film about a real fracture in modern life. The problem is that the film never steps outside the system it is examining. It stays trapped inside the Japanese solution and mistakes a Japanese symptom for a universal truth.
Western Society is built on individualism, litigation, and personal boundaries. It produces a specific kind of loneliness that is now also part of culture of Japan. Its rental family industry was partly designed to address this problem but it failed to look beyond Japan.
Examples Beyond Japan
Two reference points would have transformed this film’s conclusion.
Sweden developed something called the time bank. People exchange time and companionship without money and without theatrical role titles. Nobody is hired to be your father. Nobody performs a scripted part. People simply help each other. Compassion remains structurally human because no one is wearing a label.
India offers an even more instructive case. Here too, urban micro-families struggle under the weight of aging parents. Elderly people, sometimes senile, sometimes simply worn down by time, cannot be fully cared for by working children. So a maid arrives. A nurse. A caregiver. No one calls her a surrogate daughter. She is simply present every day. She listens. She brings water at night. Trust builds without a title attached to it. The adult children who pay for her care quietly fade into the background. Not because they are bad children, but because she is there and they are not. The bond that forms is genuine and durable. It does not collapse. It does not need to be shut down. Because it was never named, it was never scripted. And because it was never scripted, it never had to perform.
There is a deeper reason why India’s nameless model works where Japan’s named one failed. Japan built its rental family industry on a social fabric that had thinned. Empathy had to be manufactured, packaged, and sold with a job title because it was no longer ambient. Social conditions differ in India.
India starts from a completely different position. The stranger is not a threat here. He is a neighbor not yet introduced. Help arrives before it is requested. A lost earbud on a pavement produces a young woman who picks it up and asks if you were looking for it. Nobody sent her. Nobody paid her. The social contract is not opt-in. It is the default. This means India would not be training caregivers or hired guests to perform compassion. It would simply be giving naturally compassionate people a structured context. The payment is not the transaction. It is the bonus.
The Missing Nuance
The implications of naming a relationship, while paying for the same, is what Rental Family never fully grasps. Japan’s error is not the paid relationship. The error is naming the role. The moment you call someone a rental father, you create an expectation that performance must match reality. That gap will eventually destroy the arrangement. Every time.
Thus, the film treats Japan’s loneliness as a peculiarly Japanese condition. It is not. Every society where micro-families have replaced extended kinship networks carries this fracture. Japan simply tried to solve it with labels and commerce. That is what failed. The film shows the failure with honesty and grace. But it does not show the alternatives.
Rental Family is a good film. It is warm, melancholic, and carries genuine feeling in every scene. Fraser reminds you what screen presence in service of a real story looks like. But the film offers collapse where it could have offered perspective. It earns its grief. It just does not earn its conclusion, because it never looks beyond the room it is already standing in.
Worth watching. Worth thinking past.
In the part – 2 of this article, I will discuss how India can have similar agencies to solve some of its unique problems other than loneliness. That is called problem of abundance.