In Rental Family, Brendan Fraser’s character Phillip does a lot of pretending. While looking for gigs as an American actor living in Tokyo, he lands a strange role: “token white guy.” And it gets weirder, the more Phillip learns about it: His new employer, a company called “Rental Family,” doesn’t cast for the stage or the screen. They hire actors—“surrogates”—to play roles in people’s lives, to “help people connect to what’s missing.”
Phillip becomes whatever the company’s clients need him to be: a mourner at a staged funeral, a groom for an anxious bride, the dad who’s finally part of the picture. Sometimes he pretends to be these people for 30 minutes, sometimes he has to live the lie for weeks on end. Soon, Phillip comes to love the job he was initially so skeptical of.
This fits with Phillip’s curious, nonjudgmental posture toward Japan. Co-writer/director Hikari and cinematographer Takuro Ishizaka convey Phillip’s outsider-insider respect and wonder through their camerawork, often employing wide, lingering shots of the Tokyo cityscape and surrounding countryside. But where the film gives us the perfect amount of Japan, it gives us too much of Phillip, or at least too many half-formed side plots (gigs) and outings with his surrogates. Ultimately, though, Hikari delivers an enjoyable and adamantly hopeful film.
And Rental Family could have easily been terrible. It could have been an artistically shot exotification of loneliness economies in Japan. Or it could have grabbed at the low-hanging fruit of seeking authenticity in a curated world (de)generated by artificial intelligence. Instead, the film stays tender while pursuing a more unexpected thesis: If you can’t love your neighbor, fake it. Fake it so they can make it. You never know, the lie might end up saving both your souls.
After a screening at the Toronto International Film Festival where Rental Family premiered, Hikari shared that she wanted to make an “authentic” film, so she interviewed both actors and patrons of rental-family-esque services in Japan. One patron she interviewed had simply wanted to have someone to go watch a movie with, Hikari explained. Another person she interviewed had sought rental-family services because they lost their real family during the 2011 tsunami.
READ: Sojourners’ Top Movies of 2025
Any of these real-life patrons would be fortunate to hire an actor as earnest as Phillip. Fraser offers up a compelling, compassionate performance, as his skepticism for the ethics and efficacy of the Rental Family company transforms into devotion. But the true standout is Akira Emoto, whose portrayal of the 80-year-old retired actor Kikuo Hasegawa is electric. We meet Kikuo when his daughter calls Rental Family, asking for an actor to portray a journalist writing a profile of her father. For many decades, Kikuo was a prolific, adored actor, but now he senses his relevance fading, just like his memory. His daughter hopes that Phillip’s regular interviews, tape recorder in hand, will show her father that he still matters to the world.
And here’s where the moral rub enters the frame. If lies of omission can be generous, can lies of commission also be kind?
Rental Family makes a strong, occasionally syrupy case that, “yes,” strangers—even paid actors—can remind us of our God-given worth. A comforting thought at a time when loving a political opponent, a stranger, an enemy, can feel icky and even problematic. But pretending to love them? Quite feasible. This film might especially hit home to anyone who’s a primary caretaker or working in a care profession (nurses, pastors, therapists, social workers). But in reality, there’s an element of acting in all of our lives.
If you can’t love your neighbor, fake it. Fake it so they can make it. You never know, the lie might end up saving both your souls.
Rental Family doesn’t simply ask whether these deceptions can be justified; it wonders what such performances demand—or even gift—the performers themselves. Each gig rearranges Phillip’s interior life a little, blurring the lines between service and sincerity, acting and caring. The more Philip steps into other people’s longings, the more he begins to reckon with his own. Rental Family suggests that sometimes a counterfeit, transactional intimacy can still reveal a true ache.
About midway through the film, during one of his many faux interviews with Kikuo, Philip teases the old actor about his persistent bowing to different alters—an admirable, dawdling reverence. Kikuo, in response, asks Phillip if he’s familiar with the concept of “8-million gods,” known in Shinto as Yaoyorozu no Kami. Phillip’s never heard of it. Neither has John Conway, the journalist Phillip is pretending to be (By this point, Phillip and John have become indistinguishable.) The concept of 8-million gods, Kikuo explains, means that God is in everything, “even in you.” Even in who you’re pretending to be.
Jenna Barnett is the culture editor at Sojourners and the producer of the award-winning podcast Lead Us Not.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!
