Rental Family
First screened and reviewed in November 2025
Director: Hikari. Cast: Brendan Fraser, Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto, Kimura Bun, Shannon Mahina Gorman, Shino Shinozaki, Akira Emoto, Sei Matobu, Tamae Andō, Misato Morita, Nanami Kawakami, Daikichi Sugawara, Hideko Hara, Yuka Itaya, Hinata Kaizu, Misuzu Kanno, Kenji Kishida, Moeko Koyama. Screenplay: Gus Van Sant. In Brief:
Open to light enjoyment, and refreshing around the edges. But POV on core premise is vague and increasingly lopsided.
VOR:③
Certain aspects feel predictable for how a Hollywood movie couch this story in this space. In other ways, opens up new, less blinkered possibilities.
One nice thing about Rental Family is that it spends way fewer of its 110 minutes than I'd feared on fish-out-of-water comedy. Brendan Fraser's struggling actor Phillip Vandarpleog (!) has already been living in Japan for seven years by the time the plot starts. He already speaks Japanese. The movie takes this for granted as totally normal, not a laborious or miraculous achievement, even for an American. Longish dialogue passages play out in subtitled Japanese, as if U.S. multiplex fare sees this as no big deal. Aside from the very occasional soft-touch sight gag and his total dumbfoundedness by the industry he's about to join, Phillip's presence in Japan is a precept of the story, not a running gag or a portal into needless exposition. Cate Blanchett voice: "The world is round, people!"
Another nice thing is that director Hikari, a Beef vet, plays things pretty even-keeled on the tonal front, allowing us more than other filmmakers do to decide when we're amused or unsettled or empathetic or uncertain, rather than careening amongst baldly specified emotional extremes, as this script might have invited. A third nice thing is the feisty but earnest performance Hikari gets from Akira Emoto (Maborosi, Shoplifters, The Eel) as a former actor fighting the advance of dementia, and a fourth nice thing is that Fraser, while still a strange combination of stilted and relaxed, only arguably capable of making complex performance choices, is a much more inviting presence here than in The Whale.
Rental Family, though, is a "nice" movie more than a good one, and after a lightly engaging, admirably non-antic hour+, it's steadily more debilitated by a series of compromises and indecisions—palpable throughout but no longer disguisable, or even taken as points of pride. The most obvious is how Rental Family passes from a movie where Fraser's Phillip needs to be schooled by several Japanese characters to understand the "outlandish" prospect of human decoys for hire as a culturally specific practice—one that must be read and respected in its context—to a movie where more and more Japanese characters must be won over to Phillip's earlier presumption that this is all an enterprise in deception, as destructive to practitioners as to their clients and the people they are conspiring to dupe. By the last of the movie's four or five endings, things are a little more complex than that, with Phillip's earlier assurance to a child that "sometimes it's okay to pretend" hanging pregnantly in the air. But they're not much more complex. Almost everyone stands to learn a thing or two from the American neophyte, or forgive him for what they previously criticized, or thank him for behavior that the movie works hard not to depict as reckless. The rising stream of exculpatory sentiment practically gurgles.
I appreciate that, at least until that last act, Rental Family isn't really constructed as an open-ended referendum on whether "we" in the theater think the market in rentable husbands, fathers, friends, mourners, etc., is or isn't "good," to which a monolithic answer is unlikely to exist across all viewers. But it's also not necessarily uniform across circumstances, and Rental Family never really countenances that the ethically tricky business at its center might be decent and kind in this situation but tawdry or injurious in that one. Hikari's disinclination to editorialize starts to seem more like an unwillingness to press on even the most obvious paradoxes and provocations in her scenario. Holding back as a director shouldn't mean having so little, finally, to say, so few risks to take, or so few meaningful contrasts to draw.
Meanwhile, at the level of technique, Rental Family looks perfectly fine projected big in a cinema, but I wouldn't call Takurō Ishizaka's images all that inspired. The movie's at its worst in recurrent cutaways to drone photography of Japanese cities, Japanese trains, Japanese horizons and landscapes: again, more of an ad for "Japan" as a whole than a specific, in situ depiction of one pocket of the country, where all kinds of disagreements and uneasy social dilemmas might coexist or rub uncomfortably together. As Hikari cuts among multiple subplots, they don't necessarily spark off each other or accumulate useful tensions. Some stop sparking at all.
In sum, there are many moments where Rental Family suggests a textured familiarity with its subject and with its geography, human and otherwise. At other, increasingly frequent times, it seems like a slightly bewildered, thematically noncommittal, benignly "pleasant" version of the film we deserve, speaking its memorized lines and putting itself semi-gracefully through mapped-out motions, but recognizable as something of an impostor. Grade:C
(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
Awards:
Chicago International Film Festival: Audience Award (Narrative Features)
