Hikari, “Rental Family” (2025)
Beginning in the 1990s, rental family services offering actors to stand in for family members, spouses, friends, co-workers or companions at weddings, funerals or other social events began in Japan: such services have been seen as distinctly Japanese, meeting and fulfilling the needs of a socially conservative Confucianist-oriented society such as saving face, maintaining family and other traditional social hierarchies, and satisfying other forms of social etiquette, though the idea of renting actors to replace absent relatives and others has since spread to other countries, notably South Korea, and these services now also offer counselling, refuge and important social connections as family and community ties weaken, social identities and loyalties fray, and the concept of lifetime employment is increasingly unavailable to new generations of workers. These issues of social connection and identity, of maintaining links between generations through memories and social etiquette, and of the social changes that underlie them – not to mention the blurring of distinctions between what is genuine and what is not – dominate “Rental Family”, a comedy drama based around a rental family service and its employees, of whom one happens to be a foreigner, American actor Phillip Vandarploeg (Brendan Fraser), who has been living in Japan for seven years, trying to find a solid and stable acting job after appearing in a toothpaste commercial that brought him to the country. He is hired by Rental Family, run by Shinji (Takehiro Hira), which provides actors to stand in for family members and friends for clients. Initially Phillip is troubled by the company’s premise, seeing it as cynical and insincere, but he needs the money so he becomes Rental Family’s token gaijin (foreigner). After helping a young woman escape the social restrictions of her very traditional family by “marrying” her – and thus allowing her to travel abroad with her real spouse (her lesbian partner) – Phillip starts taking other jobs with Rental Family: among these are two long-term jobs, one acting as the estranged father of half-Japanese / half-American girl Mia (Shannon Gorman) whose mother wants enrol her into a private school, the other as a journalist writing the memoirs of retired actor Kikuo Hasegawa (Akira Emoto) who has dementia.
Though the film revolves around Phillip’s two main jobs – these jobs form the plot and the major sub-plot – it includes some minor sub-plots that help flesh out aspects of what rental family services do in Japan and enrich the viewer’s knowledge and understanding of Japanese culture and values. Phillip’s Rental Family co-worker Aiko (Mari Yamamoto) has the unenviable job of standing in for mistresses of errant husbands apologising to the husbands’ wives, risking physical and verbal abuse as she does so. Eventually Phillip must face the fact that one of his regular jobs must end: Mia succeeds in passing the selection tests to the private school and the two must part ways though they have made an emotional connection. This leads him to take Kikuo on a trip across Japan to the elderly actor’s childhood home, to find a time capsule of photos of his long-lost daughter.
The plot and sub-plot form the film’s emotional core as Phillip discovers meaning, purpose and ultimately fulfillment from being involved in Mia and Kikuo’s lives, and enabling them to discover their own purpose or reconnect with their family and community. The most moving scenes come when Phillip and Kikuo evade Kikuo’s daughter and household staff in a “jailbreak” and journey via train through breathtaking rural and mountain scenery to Kikuo’s old home, now in ruins and overgrown with greenery, to find the time capsule and the photos that hold so much meaning and symbolism for Kikuo, and which he tries to communicate to Phillip. With minor sub-plots, the film keeps busy and brisk, so (apart from Phillip) the characters tend to be one-dimensional, and the various narratives can come across as rather superficial and not a little sugary. Even the few sleazy moments, when Phillip accompanies a reclusive gamer to a sex club, can appear incongruously wholesome.
While undoubtedly Fraser owns the film with his performances, the rest of the cast does very good work portraying characters who initially appear inscrutable but turn out to be wacky and eccentric. Hikari’s direction and co-scripting provide the film with the right balance of twee whimsy, realism and deeply felt emotion, and Takuro Ishikawa’s cinematography shows off a rural Japan that can be stunningly beautiful. Even so, the viewer is confronted with a scenario in which a mother cruelly manipulates her child to believe that a stranger can be her real father – and the child later discovers the man she believes to be her father is actually an actor. The way in which this scenario is resolved in the film may appear too smooth to be credible, though Gorman does a good job portraying Mia as a child possessed of inner reserves of strength and resilience to overcome the potential psychological trauma. The lesser scenario in which an elderly man with neurological problems is kidnapped, and the kidnapping exposed, with all the potential consequences including jail time and possible deportation, is just as quickly and smoothly dealt with, resulting in an improbably happy ending.
Who would have thought that a film about loneliness, loss of connection and family fragmentation, and people struggling to maintain social appearances in a society that demands social conformity to a repressive degree, could turn out to be an emotionally warm and heartfelt work that emphasises not only social connection but also connection with nature and ultimately – as Phillip discovers when he visits Kikuo’s favourite shrine and peers inside – with the divine?