Rental Family

In the beginning of Rental Family, Phillip Vanderploeg (Brendan Fraser) has been living in Japan for seven years. He is an actor who originally arrived to shoot one toothpaste commercial but has stuck around, trying to build a career, but it is evident from his face – Brendan Fraser giving one of the most stunning performance of sadness and loneliness – that it hasn’t quite worked out. He is isolated, he is struggling, the bit parts he is getting are frustrating. As he is watching people in the building opposite his small apartment at night, observing their routines, their togetherness, his solitude becomes even more apparent. He isn’t just an outsider in this country that he is eager to understand but hasn’t quite grasped, a man who speaks the language but still reverts to English when he can, but a stranger in his own life.

Then, accidentally, a life-changing opportunity comes his way. He is hired to play a “sad American” (a role made for him, you might say) at what he thinks is a funeral but is actually a fake production to allow the “deceased” to experience how much he is loved and cherished. The owner of the company is Shinji Tada (Takehiro Hira from Giri/Haji, Shōgun, and Monarch) and he is eager to hire Phillip as the “token white guy”. His business: hiring out people who pretend to be family members or mourners or party guests, to provide experiences to his clients that exist on the spectrum of providing prestige to creating catharsis in a country where mental health problems are rarely discussed and resources for treatment are difficult to access. Shinji is a complex character (how complex will be revealed late in the film in a truly shocking, Dollhouse-esque scene): he seems convinced about the deep emotional value that his company provides, proudly displaying the hundreds of client files to remind himself of all the people he is helped, yet too business-driven to make ethical decisions about which cases to take on and which to pass because they might cause lasting emotional damage in either the clients or his employees. Phillip’s first assignment seems hand-picked for him to only see the good side. He poses as the groom for a woman eager to escape her family while helping them to keep face: after the marriage, she will “move to Canada” with her husband, except it turns out this is a ploy for her to be able to begin her life with her wife. It’s a genuinely moving moment in spite of the inherent sadness in the idea that the bride’s father would be so enthusiastic about a man he has only met at his daughter’s wedding sharing her life while she has to keep the person that means the most to her secret. Phillip, in observing what he has made possible with his performance, seems to finally have found meaning, the promise that his work can have a lasting positive impact. It’s enough to sway him to sign on, in spite of his initial jitters (he almost does not go through with it and needs to be coaxed through by his frustrated colleague Aiko, played by Mari Yamamoto in a scene-stealing performance) not just because of what he can do for others, but because he is determined to understand his new country and all of its social intricacies better (he could spend 100 years here and still not quite get it, he is told early, and maybe that’s something to keep in mind).

The limits of the business concept are immediately obvious to the viewers but Phillip’s eagerness to participate in something that gives him meaning ameliorates his doubts. A woman hires him to play an estranged father to her young daughter, a necessary deception to get her into a prestigious private school. It would be different if the kid (Shannon Mahina Gorman) was in on it, but instead she is being deceived as well: and as her initial rage at this man who supposedly abandoned her and her mother turns into genuine feelings of affections because Phillip tries so hard to be a good father figure, the emotional fall-out of the inevitable (when the deception is revealed, and Phillip stops showing up) becomes overbearing. The idea of the authentic within the fake – because the feelings are real, even if it is all based on a performance – is at the centre of the film, because Phillip is a deeply empathetic person, who might be better suited to the job if he were more cynical and detached. Instead, the experience has changed him, as he is spending more and more time with his clients and gets entangled in their lives. What is the difference between a fake father and a real one, when is is providing emotional support that the client desperately needs? How is his care for an old actor with dementia who is retelling his life story to preserve his most cherished memories any less real than if he were an actual journalist, writing about him, if the emotional impact on the man is so genuine and life-changing that he is eager to set out for a last journey into his past to retrieve lost treasures? Phillip can’t draw boundaries, and so there are none. He himself is filling an emotional abyss with meaning he derives from this work, and so he can’t pull back or stop himself when he is going too far. The film also provides an emotional counterweight in showing how Aiko’s experience of the work differs radically from Phillip’s: as a woman, she is frequently asked to play fake mistresses who are asked to apologise to cheating husband’s wives for their transgressions. She doesn’t get any of Phillip’s catharsis of genuine human connection, instead suffering beatings that she can’t escape but charges extra for, in work that looks more harrowing than meaningful, and drives her to the brink. 

At any stage, this film could have veered off into being a completely different film: a thriller, perhaps, because the stakes are so high, especially when Phillip decides to break out the actor for his final journey. Instead, director Hikari, supported by beautiful cinematography and a soundtrack by Jónsi, creates a beautifully emotional film that is sad and funny at the same time, and carried by a stunning, maybe career-best performance by Fraser, who is so good at capturing every emotion with his face. 

2025, directed by Hikari, starring Brendan Fraser, Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto, Shannon Mahina Gorman, Akira Emoto.