Rental Family

Based on Wikipedia: Rental Family

In Japan, you can rent a father.

Not a stepfather. Not an adoptive father. A professional actor who will show up at your school interview, charm the admissions committee, and convince everyone he's been part of your life all along. When the interview ends, he leaves. You might never see him again. Or you might hire him for years, building a relationship with someone whose job is to pretend he loves you.

This isn't science fiction. It's a real industry in Japan called "rental family" services, and it became the inspiration for one of 2025's most unexpectedly moving films.

The Premise That Sounds Like Satire

Rental Family, directed by the filmmaker known simply as Hikari, follows Phillip Vanderploeg, an American actor living in Japan who can't catch a break. His career peaked with a toothpaste commercial. Now he takes whatever minor roles he can find, desperately trying to stay afloat in a foreign country where he's perpetually the outsider.

Then he discovers Rental Family, a company that does exactly what its name suggests. Need a father for your daughter's school interview? They have actors for that. Want to stage a traditional wedding ceremony for your conservative parents even though you're already married to your wife and moving to Canada? They can provide a convincing fiancé. Phillip becomes the company's "token white guy"—useful for clients who need a Western face in their manufactured family portrait.

The absurdity is the point. Hikari and co-writer Stephen Blahut use this bizarre premise to ask questions that cut surprisingly deep: What makes a family real? Can a relationship that begins as a transaction become genuine? And what happens to the actors who spend their lives pretending to love strangers?

Brendan Fraser's Unlikely Resurrection

The film stars Brendan Fraser, and if you haven't been following his career recently, you might be surprised to learn he's having one of the most remarkable second acts in Hollywood history.

Fraser was everywhere in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He was the charming adventurer in The Mummy franchise, the lovable lunkhead in George of the Jungle, and a genuine movie star with the kind of earnest, approachable charisma that made audiences root for him. Then he largely disappeared from major films for over a decade.

The reasons were painful. Fraser has spoken publicly about depression following a sexual assault by a Hollywood executive, physical injuries from performing his own stunts, and a divorce that left him financially strained. He became a cautionary tale about how quickly fame can evaporate.

Then came The Whale in 2022, where he played a morbidly obese English teacher trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter. The performance earned him an Academy Award for Best Actor. Critics and audiences alike were stunned—not just by the physical transformation, but by the raw emotional depth Fraser brought to a character drowning in shame and desperate for connection.

Rental Family feels like a natural extension of that resurrection. Once again, Fraser plays a man whose life hasn't gone according to plan, who finds himself in strange circumstances, and who discovers that genuine human connection can emerge from the most unlikely places.

The Clients

The film introduces us to Phillip's clients gradually, each representing a different reason someone might hire a fake family member.

There's Yoshie, a lesbian woman who wants to give her traditional parents the experience of a conventional wedding before she and her wife emigrate to Canada. She doesn't need Phillip to deceive her parents forever—just for one ceremony, one set of photographs, one memory they can cherish. The lie is a gift wrapped in love.

There's Mia, a young hāfu girl—the Japanese term for someone who is half Japanese and half another ethnicity. The word itself reveals something about how Japan categorizes identity: you're not fully Japanese if you're mixed, and you're not fully the other thing either. You exist in a liminal space. Mia's mother Hitomi needs a father figure for school interviews because Japanese private schools still operate on assumptions about what a proper family looks like. Without a father—even a rented one—Mia's applications would suffer.

And there's Kikuo Hasegawa, a retired actor with dementia whose daughter Masami keeps him under constant supervision. Masami hires Phillip to pose as a journalist profiling her father, giving Kikuo the dignity of feeling important and remembered during his final years. It's a kind fiction, the sort of lie we tell people we love when the truth would only cause pain.

When Pretending Becomes Real

The heart of the film lies in what happens when Phillip starts to care.

This is the danger of the rental family business, and the movie doesn't shy away from it. Shinji, the agency owner, repeatedly warns Phillip that parting ways with clients is inevitable. The job requires emotional labor without emotional attachment. You show up, you perform, you leave. Getting invested is a professional failure.

But Phillip can't help himself. He watches Mia, initially resentful of the father who "abandoned" her, gradually warm to his presence. He sees Kikuo light up when talking about the old days, when he was a star, when people knew his name. These connections feel real because, on some level, they are real. The feelings Phillip develops aren't part of the script.

When Phillip's agent offers him a coveted acting role—a legitimate one, the kind of break he's been chasing for years—he turns it down because accepting would mean abandoning Mia before her school interview. This is a man who came to Japan to become a star, who has been scraping by on toothpaste commercials and bit parts, and he's now choosing a fake relationship over a real career opportunity.

Is that admirable or pathological? The film seems to suggest it might be both.

The Trip to Nowhere

The film's emotional climax comes when Phillip decides to break the rules completely. Kikuo, lost in the fog of dementia but occasionally surfacing into clarity, asks Phillip to take him to his childhood home. Masami, his daughter, has forbidden this. Too risky. Too much could go wrong. The old man might not survive the journey.

Phillip takes him anyway.

They drive to the countryside, to a house now overtaken by nature, reclaimed by the wilderness that existed before humans built walls and called it home. Kikuo finds a time capsule he buried decades ago, when he was young and the future stretched endless before him. He weeps. He thanks Phillip for bringing him here.

When Shinji calls, furious about the "kidnapping," Phillip finally says what he's been thinking all along. He accuses Shinji of running a soulless business that fills empty holes in people's lives without creating anything genuine. Rental Family provides the appearance of connection without the substance. It's a prosthetic limb for loneliness.

But then the film complicates its own critique. Shinji, stung by Phillip's accusation, dismisses his "wife" and teenage "son"—revealing that his own family is composed entirely of rental actors. The man who runs the agency is also its most dedicated client. He's not cynically exploiting other people's loneliness. He's drowning in the same ocean.

The Business of Borrowed Intimacy

The rental family industry is real, and it's been operating in Japan for decades. Companies like Family Romance, founded by Ishii Yuichi in 2009, provide actors for a staggering variety of situations. You can rent a wedding guest, a mourner for a funeral, an old friend for a reunion, or a father for your entire childhood.

Some clients hire the same rental relative for years. Children grow up with stand-in fathers who appear at school events, birthday parties, and graduations. The lines between performance and reality blur. One client reportedly hired a rental father for her daughter, then continued the arrangement for over a decade without ever telling the girl the truth. When do you reveal that the man who taught you to ride a bike, who showed up at your soccer games, who walked you down the aisle at your wedding, was being paid by the hour?

Werner Herzog made a documentary about this phenomenon in 2019, also called Family Romance, LLC, following Ishii himself as he navigated the ethical complexities of his business. Herzog was fascinated by the philosophical questions the industry raises: In a society where genuine connection is difficult, is manufactured connection better than none at all? When an actor performs love convincingly enough, does it matter that it started as a job?

These are ancient questions wearing modern clothes. Theater has always explored the boundary between authentic and performed emotion. When an actor weeps on stage, the tears are real even if the circumstances are fictional. Method actors famously blur the line between themselves and their characters, sometimes to psychologically damaging degrees. The rental family industry simply moves this performance off the stage and into living rooms, school interviews, and hospital beds.

The Other Story

While Phillip's journey provides the main narrative, the film also follows Aiko, one of his coworkers at the agency. Her regular assignment is grimmer than playing a father at school events.

Aiko pretends to be a mistress.

Here's how it works: a married man cheats on his wife. He gets caught, or he fears getting caught, or he simply can't face the confrontation himself. So he hires the rental family agency to provide an actress who will pose as the other woman and apologize to the wife on his behalf. The husband gets to appear contrite without actually doing the difficult emotional work of making amends. The wife gets to yell at someone. The actress absorbs the rage.

These sessions often turn violent. Aiko is physically abused by wives whose fury, understandably, boils over. She's a scapegoat in the most literal sense—taking on the sins of men who are too cowardly to face the consequences of their own behavior.

The film doesn't moralize about this directly, but it doesn't need to. Watching Aiko submit to violence on behalf of unfaithful strangers is its own argument. Eventually, she breaks. During one session, she stops performing, tells the wife the truth about what's happening, and walks out. The agency later discontinues its "apology services" entirely.

What Makes a Family Real?

The question haunts every frame of the film, and it's a question without an easy answer.

Consider what we typically mean by family. Blood relations, certainly—the people who share your genetic material, who look like you, who carry forward whatever combination of traits the biological lottery handed down. But also chosen family: spouses who become relatives, friends who become brothers, communities that become tribes.

What distinguishes real family from fake family? Intention, perhaps. Real families intend to stay. They're not performing a role that ends when the contract expires. They've committed to showing up, year after year, even when it's inconvenient, even when the love is difficult to access.

But the rental family industry complicates even this definition. Some clients hire the same rental relative for decades. The performance becomes indistinguishable from the reality. If a rented father shows up to every birthday party, remembers your favorite color, and celebrates your accomplishments with apparent genuine joy, what exactly makes him less real than a biological father who abandoned you at birth?

Perhaps the answer is that all families are, in some sense, performances. We play roles for each other—the responsible parent, the grateful child, the supportive spouse—and we maintain these performances even when our private feelings diverge from our public actions. The rental family industry simply makes the performance explicit and transactional, removing the pretense that family roles emerge naturally from blood or marriage.

The Film's Quiet Argument

Rental Family ultimately suggests that what matters isn't whether a relationship begins as genuine or manufactured, but whether it becomes genuine along the way. Phillip starts as a hired actor. He ends as someone who genuinely loves Mia and mourns Kikuo. The transaction was real, but so were the feelings that grew from it.

After Kikuo dies—peacefully, in his sleep—Phillip visits the shrine where the old man used to pray. He doesn't have to. The job is over. The client is gone. But Phillip goes anyway, because some connections outlast the circumstances that created them.

The final image of the film shows Phillip still working at the agency, still filling hired roles for strangers, but now with his eyes open to both the absurdity and the strange grace of what he does. He's found a family in the most unlikely place: a company that sells families to people who don't have them.

Critical Response and Legacy

The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2025 and gradually built momentum through the fall festival circuit, screening in Rome, Tokyo, Adelaide, and Stockholm before its theatrical release in November.

Critics responded warmly. On Rotten Tomatoes, the review aggregator that calculates the percentage of positive reviews, eighty-seven percent of critics gave it a favorable assessment. The site's consensus described it as "a sweet-natured dramedy about faking human connection until you make it," praising Fraser for his "sensitive star power."

The German critic Dieter Oßwald captured something essential when he wrote that the film explores "identity, lies, and loneliness" with a "delightful ease." He called Fraser's performance "Oscar-worthy" and described the movie as "a heartwarming crowd-pleaser with depth." That combination—crowd-pleasing accessibility plus genuine emotional complexity—is difficult to achieve. Many films sacrifice one for the other.

The National Board of Review, an organization of film enthusiasts and industry professionals that has been recognizing excellence in cinema since 1909, named Rental Family one of the top ten films of 2025. Audiences agreed: CinemaScore, which surveys opening-night audiences, gave the film an "A" grade on their scale from A+ to F.

At the box office, the film outperformed modest expectations, earning $3.3 million in its opening weekend against a projected $2.6 million. For an indie drama released by Searchlight Pictures (the specialty arm of Disney known for prestige films like The Shape of Water and Nomadland), these numbers represented a solid start.

The Broader Conversation

What makes Rental Family resonate beyond its specific Japanese setting is its engagement with a universal anxiety: the fear that our connections are somehow inauthentic, that we're all performing roles for each other, that loneliness is the default human condition and community requires constant, exhausting work to maintain.

Social scientists have documented rising rates of loneliness across developed nations for decades. The reasons are numerous and interconnected: increased geographic mobility that separates families, digital communication that replaces face-to-face interaction, work cultures that demand total commitment at the expense of relationships, declining religious participation that once provided built-in communities, and housing patterns that isolate people in single-family homes or anonymous apartment buildings.

Japan has faced these challenges with particular intensity. The country has specific terms for phenomena that exist elsewhere but seem especially concentrated there: hikikomori (people who withdraw from society entirely, sometimes for years), kodokushi (dying alone and not being discovered for extended periods), and parasaito shinguru (adult children who never leave their parents' home, unable to form independent lives).

The rental family industry emerged from this soil of disconnection. It's both a symptom of the problem and an imperfect solution—a business that exists because genuine connection has become so difficult that people will pay professionals to simulate it.

But Rental Family the film suggests that even simulated connection might kindle something real. Phillip and Mia's relationship begins as a transaction and ends as friendship. The love was rented; the love became genuine. Perhaps that's not so different from any relationship, romantic or familial, that begins with obligation and grows into something more.

A Note on the Director

The film was directed by Hikari, a Japanese filmmaker who works under a single name. In Hollywood, where everyone has three names and a middle initial, this minimal identification stands out. Hikari co-wrote the script with Stephen Blahut, an American writer, creating a collaboration that mirrors the film's cross-cultural premise.

The film had been in development since 2019, long before Fraser's comeback with The Whale. Casting him in late 2023, just as his Oscar victory was reminding the world of his talents, was either prescient or lucky. Either way, the timing proved perfect. Fraser's real-life story of loss and resurrection resonates with Phillip's fictional journey as a washed-up actor who finds purpose in an unexpected role.

Principal photography took place in Japan over approximately two and a half months in early 2024, with the production wrapping in late May. The film benefits from authentic Japanese locations and a predominantly Japanese supporting cast, including Takehiro Hira as the agency owner Shinji, Mari Yamamoto as the abused actress Aiko, and Akira Emoto as the elderly actor Kikuo. Only Shannon Mahina Gorman, who plays Mia, shares Fraser's Western heritage—appropriate for a character defined by her mixed-race identity.

The Final Question

At its heart, Rental Family asks whether love can be manufactured and then become real, or whether manufactured love is always, on some level, a counterfeit.

The film's answer seems to be: both.

Phillip's love for Mia and Kikuo is genuine by the end. It grew from performance into truth. But it also originated in transaction, which means it carries a shadow of that origin. Mia discovers the deception and must reckon with it. Kikuo dies without ever learning that his journalist friend was an actor playing a role. The truth and the lie coexist, each inflecting the other.

Perhaps all relationships work this way, to some degree. We perform versions of ourselves for the people we love. We emphasize certain traits and suppress others. We show up even when we don't feel like it, acting the part of devoted spouse or attentive parent until the performance becomes habit becomes identity becomes truth.

The rental family industry just makes the performance explicit. It charges by the hour. It has contracts and cancellation policies. But beneath the commercial structure, the same human needs pulse: the need to be seen, to be remembered, to have someone show up at your school interview and claim you as their own.

Whether that someone is blood or hired might matter less than we think.