{"id":404698,"date":"2025-09-07T07:35:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-07T07:35:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/404698\/"},"modified":"2025-09-07T07:35:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T07:35:12","slug":"brendan-frasier-in-hikari-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/404698\/","title":{"rendered":"Brendan Frasier in Hikari Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2019, Werner Herzog <\/a>\u2014 of the \u201c\u201cI believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder\u201d Herzogs \u2014\u00a0made a scripted movie about the proliferation of rental family<\/a> services in modern Japan. Titled \u201cFamily Romance, LLC,<\/a>\u201d it tells the story of a local actor who\u2019s hired to be the father of a 12-year-old girl who no longer remembers her real dad; over time, the line between performance and reality blurs to the point that the protagonist suffers an existential crisis that leads him to question whether the corpses at funerals might actually be dead, and to wonder if his closest relatives are just random people who\u2019ve been paid to perform for him since birth. The film<\/a> ends with the actor hiding from his own child, his sense of self forever destabilized as a result of the other roles he\u2019s played.<\/p>\n

\"Channing<\/a> \"Wake<\/a> <\/p>\n

This might surprise you to hear, but Hikari\u2019s \u201cRental Family\u201d \u2014 a sweet and twinkly Searchlight drama starring Brendan Fraser<\/a> as a middle-aged American sad sack who moved to Tokyo for a toothpaste commercial, only to spend the next seven years playing the token white guy in a string of unmemorable projects \u2014\u00a0unfolds a little differently. This is a nice movie: the kind that\u2019s lit brighter than a dentist\u2019s office, scored by the lead singer of Sigur R\u00f3s (along with Alex Somers), and aimed towards a heart-stirring conclusion about empathy, isolation, and the power that we all have to affect each other\u2019s lives. It\u2019s about the hard areas of being human, but it only displays a passing interest in exploring them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For all of its soft and fuzziness, however, \u201cRental Family\u201d is no less honest than Herzog\u2019s film where it matters \u2014\u00a0it just takes a more treacly road towards reaching the ecstatic truth. And in this case, a little eyeroll-inducing bullshit goes a long way. Known for \u201c37 Seconds\u201d and her excellent work on \u201cTokyo Vice,\u201d Hikari may be too straightforward a storyteller to indulge in any explicitly self-reflexive shenanigans, but there\u2019s something to be said for emotional manipulation in the context of a movie that celebrates the fact that feelings \u2014 and relationships \u2014\u00a0can be as real as the belief that we invest in them, even if only for a while.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One telling difference between \u201cRental Family\u201d and \u201cFamily Romance, LLC\u201d: Here, the coffin stuff comes at the start of the film. Constantly apologizing to people in lieu of being sorry for himself, Phil Vandarploeg (Fraser) is first introduced running late to an audition, and the next time we see him he\u2019s literally playing a tree. He doesn\u2019t seem to have any loved ones or hobbies, and his only \u201cfriend\u201d is a bubbly sex worker who reappears throughout the film to help Phil to make sense of the kayfabe intimacy he creates for his own clientele. (I can\u2019t remember the last time a nice American-ish movie displayed such a positive and dignified perspective on sex work).\u00a0<\/p>\n

So when Phil is hired \u2014 without any kind of heads up \u2014\u00a0to play a mourner at the funeral of a man who\u2019s actually still alive, we have a vague sense of why he\u2019s tempted to lie down in the casket for a moment after the service is over. Don\u2019t worry, Phil! In stark contrast to Herzog\u2019s version, this will be the story of someone who finds their way back to reality, and to meaningfully participating in life, be it his life or somebody else\u2019s.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Confused and intrigued by his gig as a paid guest at a mock funeral (presumably the most interesting and meaningful acting job he\u2019s had in a long time), Phil finds himself as the newest full-time employee of Rental Family, which is one of the 300 or so businesses of its kind in Japan. People are lonely, mental health is stigmatized, and \u2014 in a country where vending machines sell everything from corn chowder to used underwear \u2014 why shouldn\u2019t you be able to buy a dollop of happiness?\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s more than a hint of irony to Rental Family\u2019s slogan (\u201cProviding True Happiness\u201d), but they\u2019re great if you want someone to clap for you at karaoke, come over to your house to play a co-op videogame, or \u2014 in a slightly more involved commission \u2014 pretend to be your Canadian groom for the course of a full traditional Shinto wedding so your small-minded parents don\u2019t know that you\u2019re a lesbian who\u2019s moving halfway around the world to be with another woman.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Phil dutifully performs all three of those roles over the course of \u201cRental Family,\u201d none of which are technically difficult or morally unsound.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the process, he even forms a kinship with his boss Shinji (Takehiro Hira), and a somewhat pricklier bond with his beautiful co-worker Aiko (Mari Yamamoto), who\u2019s hired for all sorts of female companionship gigs. Things only get complicated for Phil when a mother (Shino Shinozaki) commissions him to play the dad that her adorable 11-year-old daughter has never met. The girl\u2019s name is Mia (Shannon Gorman), she\u2019s half-white, and she\u2019s due for a family interview at the kind of prestigious middle school that will determine her entire future. The mom reasons that Mia will have a better chance to get in if her parents attend the interview as a united front, and if Mia \u2014\u00a0who is not told that Phil is just an actor \u2014 gets to know what it\u2019s like to have a father for a few weeks, well then all the better.<\/p>\n

This is almost objectively terrible parenting on her mother\u2019s part, of course, as \u2014\u00a0best-case scenario \u2014 Mia is going to have to lose her \u201cfather\u201d all over again when Phil\u2019s contract expires. But the relationship that Phil and Mia come to share is cute enough to shirk off the anti-logic of its design, and the what is that woman THINKING? of it all feeds into the movie\u2019s curious ambivalence towards the service that Phil\u2019s company provides. That ambivalence inevitably proves to be something of a performance unto itself (spoiler alert: \u201cRental Family\u201d is not a finger-wagging takedown of a niche Japanese industry), but Hikari wrestles with the complications of Phil\u2019s job in good faith, and for all of her movie\u2019s handholding sentimentality, she makes a real effort to recognize how the roles that we play in each others\u2019 lives can become confused.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mercifully, the gaijin of it all isn\u2019t used to poke fun at Japanese customs, or to raise an eyebrow at the country\u2019s unorthodox solution to the social crisis at hand. That Phil is an outsider \u2014 and rather visibly so \u2014 lends added weight to the idea that people can always hope to recast themselves as they move through this life, and to the related notion that most of us are simply in need of an audience (and willing to go anywhere in order to find one).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Those two ideas most explicitly braid together over the course of a subplot in which the family of an aging and semi-forgotten Japanese actor (Akira Emoto as Kikuo) hire Phil to be \u201ca film journalist\u201d who\u2019s interested in the old man\u2019s story \u2014 to offer the actor a last gasp of attention before he forgets himself. The story thread is stretched a lot further than it needs to be, and \u201cRental Family\u201d is somehow generally overextended even though none of its scenes are given even the slightest chance to breathe; heavy on circumstance and light on context, Hikari\u2019s script tells us next to nothing about who Phil was before he came to Japan in search of other parts to play.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Be that as it may, Kikuo\u2019s saga builds to an affecting gracenote that meaningfully re-centers the movie on the notion that hurt is better shared than buried; that it\u2019s better to place it in a living vessel than to ditch it in a hole somewhere. Fraser embodies that truth all too well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

An endearingly transparent actor whose one hyper-legible emotion at a time approach made him a perfect accomplice for whatever Darren Aronofsky was going for with \u201cThe Whale,\u201d Fraser plays every scene in \u201cRental Family\u201d as if he\u2019s suffering from a pain that he doesn\u2019t know how to disguise. His smile is a wince, his wince is an open wound, and his wounds seem to run so deep that the movie doesn\u2019t have the heart to even tell us what they are.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s impossible to watch Fraser\u2019s turn without thinking about the various injuries he\u2019s suffered over the span of his career (physical and otherwise), and that extra-textual layer of personal history goes a long way towards fleshing out the underwritten character he inhabits here. His see-through screen persona makes for a similar advantage, as it allows Phil\u2019s services to perfectly split the difference between the realness of his connection and the artifice of his affect. His relationship with Mia feels real as can be and glaringly fake all at once, which is just as well in a gentle little movie that recognizes truth and performance as two sides of the same coin.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Grade: B-<\/p>\n

\u201cRental Family\u201d premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Searchlight Pictures will release it in theaters on Friday, November 21.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2019, Werner Herzog \u2014 of the \u201c\u201cI believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony;…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":404699,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[96406,77,3063,3943,121445,6082,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-404698","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-brendan-fraser","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-film","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-rental-family","13":"tag-reviews","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115161866300603580","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=404698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/404699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=404698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=404698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=404698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}