Rental Family (A PopEntertainment.com Movie Review)

Rental Family

RENTAL FAMILY (2025)

Starring Brendan Fraser, Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto, Shannon Mahina Gorman, Akira Emoto, Shino Shinozaki, Paolo Andrea Di Pietro, Shinji Ozeki, Takao Kin, Risa Kameda, Yuma Sonan, Kana Kitty, Gan Furukawa, Yuji Komatsu, Ryoko Osada, Helen Sadler, Kaoru Mizuki, Shohei Uno, Sonoe Mizoguchi, Keiji Yamashita, Bun Kimura, Yuki Kimura and Tsutomu Osabe.

Screenplay by  Hikari & Stephen Blahut.

Directed by Hikari.

Distributed by Searchlight Pictures. 110 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Screened at the 2025 Philadelphia Film Festival.

“You know, sometimes it's okay to pretend.”

This line is spoken by Phillip Vandarploeug (Brendan Fraser), an American actor in Japan whose career has hit a bit of rut. Therefore, he has taken a job in which his acting skills are useful but put into everyday interactions. Specifically, he is a part of a rental family business – in which people hire individuals to play their family members, or friends, or boyfriends, or girlfriends, or best friends, or bosses, or repentant exes – during special lifetime events.

For example, the line from above was spoken to a little girl named Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman) by Phillip (but she knew him as Frank). Mia’s mother has hired Phillip to help her get her daughter into an exclusive private school – a conservative place where a child with both parents is much more likely to get entrance than one with a single mother.

What complicates the situation is that the mother has determined that Mia would not be able to tell a mistruth about something as major as this, so she has introduced him as the child’s real, long absent father. This, of course, makes the “performance” much trickier than what he is used to doing.

After all, as he said in his job interview, “I'm just an actor, I don't know how to help people.” But he learns as he goes along.

This is only one of many real-life roles he has to try on; everything from a mourner at a non-existent funeral, to a fake groom to cover up a lesbian elopement, to a journalist who wants to do a puff piece about a forgotten aging formerly-famous Japanese star.

So, essentially, Rental Family is a film about a man learning to be his true self by pretending to be someone else with people he does not really know. And while, yes, that may sound like a bit of a stretch, that does not take into account how winning the story and the performances are. Yes, the movie sometimes gets a bit sappy, and it certainly is not above a little melodrama, but mostly it is a sweet and good-hearted meditation on life, friendships, family and a love letter to Japan.

Brendan Fraser continues his streak of surprisingly good films (this is the same guy, after all, who first made his name in silly comedies like Encino Man and George of the Jungle) following No Sudden Move, Killers of the Flower Moon and The Whale (for which he won a Best Actor Oscar.)

But one of the nice things about this performance is how humble it is. Fraser is happy to cede much of the dramatic heavy lifting to his co-stars – particularly Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto, Akira Emoto and Shannon Mahina Gorman – and they are able to bring so much nuance and flavor to a story that could be played as simply a novelty stunt.

And I’ve got to admit; life is Japan looks spectacularly gorgeous in this film.

Rental Family may have a rather quirky story idea, but it pulls it off surprisingly well. Arigato. 

Jay S. Jacobs

Copyright ©2025 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: November 21, 2025.