Rental Family

If you were to hire an actor to play someone in your life, who would you ask them to play? A friend you fell out with? A grandparent you never got to meet? Someone you can’t say what you want to? What moment would you want to recreate or make real if you had the chance?

Rental Family plays with this concept by diving headfirst into the world of Japanese professional stand-in services. A service utterly foreign in our Western world, the industry has been around since the 1990s in Japan. As the 2025 dramedy explains, it’s an enterprise that sells emotions. In a culture where there are strict codes, their services provide alternatives.

“We play roles in clients’ lives. Parents, siblings, boyfriends, girlfriends, best friends,” Rental Family business owner Shinji Tada (Takehiro Hira) says. “And help them connect to what’s missing.”

In director Hikari’s film, Phillip Vanderploeg (Brendan Fraser) lands himself a job quite by accident as the “token white guy” at Tada’s business. The struggling actor who has only booked small roles since his claim to fame as a superhero fighting gingivitis in a toothpaste commercial will now play very real roles in people’s lives. A husband at a wedding, a friend to a famous ageing actor (played exceptionally by Akira Emoto), and a father to young Mia (Shannon Gorman). What Phillip doesn’t realise is that as he forms genuine bonds with these people, the lines between performance and reality will begin to blur.

Fraser delivers an exceptionally sparkling performance, filling each scene with tender yet concentrated emotion. Each movement is intentional yet utterly natural. Mari Yamamoto too is magnetic as Phillip’s coworker Aiko and Gorman offers sensitivity and intent beyond her years.

With postcard-worthy cinematography from Takuro Ishizaka and production design by Norihiro Isoda and Masako Takayama that beautifully balances the sterility of public spaces and the rich personality of private ones, Rental Family is exquisitely crafted. Where it shines most, however, is in Hikari and Stephen Blahut’s screenplay, which offers such thoughtfully woven dialogue that it feels like you’re watching a poem unfold in real time that quietly whittles away at the moral complexities of the service to reveal the beauty of human connection.