Release Date – 9th January 2026, Cert – 12, Run-time – 1 hour 50 minutes, Director – Hikari
Small-time American actor Phillip (Brendan Fraser) gets a job working for a Tokyo-based company which sends people out to play small, often unknown, roles in strangers lives.
Because of the way in which UK awards releases still tend to work Rental Family finds itself with an early-January release date. That almost seems to be the perfect place for it. Not because it’s bad or a faded awards contender, or an abandoned studio horror, but because it feels like the perfect way to start the new year, with a warming hopeful tone.
The film is as gentle and soft-spoken as Brendan Fraser’s lead character, Phillip Vandarpleog. A kind, mild-mannered small-time American actor living in Japan, occasionally recognised for starring in a toothpaste advert. While waiting for a big opportunity Phillip is invited for a small role as ‘Sad American’, being thrown in to a funeral with no script or idea what’s happening. It’s not long until he’s hired by Rental Family company owner Shinji (Takehiro Hira) as the ‘token white guy’, being sent out to play small roles in people’s lives, often unknown to them after having been hired by a friend or family member. Whether it be interviewing a forgotten actor (Akira Emoto) for a pretend magazine or spending an hour or two playing video games with someone “sometimes all we need is for someone to look us in the eye and remind us we exist.”
The main role we see Phillip take on is as a father figure for young girl Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman) in order to help her mother (Shino Shinozaki) get her into an esteemed school. However, as a bond starts to form between Phillip and Mia – creating some truly wonderful, thoughtfully-scripted interactions, including at a Monster Cat Festival – he starts to question the moral side of the work he’s been doing – as does colleague Aiko (a likable, if slightly underseen, Mari Yamamoto) who’s largely sent out to cover up affairs for cheating husbands. Co-writer (alongside Stephen Blahut) and director Hikari, with the help of editors Alan Baumgarten and Thomas A. Krueger, manages to take us from joy to disappointment and empathy to wonder-induced emotion seamlessly. The emotional course of Rental Family is consistently fluid and the run-time itself passes by quickly and with ease, in part because of the gentleness on display.
There’s a genuine heartfelt nature to everything we see, much of which is caught in Fraser’s wonderful, restrained central performance. It’s through him that most of the relationships and lives touched are seen, and the balance between the different characters and ‘roles’ Phillip takes on is well maintained whilst keeping the focus on Mia, who creates the most confliction in the lead as to what his temporary roles are actually doing.
Yet, even during these questions and the more emotional sequences I still found myself with a warm smile on my face simply from the joy of the film as a whole. The embrace that it creates for both the characters and the audience is close and comforting. Holding engagement and bringing in a number of good-natured laughs along the way. Not only is this a film that’s heart is in the right place, but it’s one that manages to do something with that, to. With the on-screen cast pushing the positive sides of the work we see the Rental Family group do in the core ideas of the film.
Rental Family was shown towards the end of this year’s London Film Festival. After over a week tiredness had well and truly started to settle in. By this stage it’s difficult to not find your head slightly nodding even at the best, and sometimes loudest, of films. Rental Family held me from start to finish with no risk of tiredness at all. Simply from the heartful emotion and gentleness that’s on display. It’s a positive, welcoming note to open the year on when the film finally releases in January. One to simply make us feel something, including a bit less alone whilst in its company.
Gentle and genuinely heartfelt, Rental Family flows through its emotions with ease and without feeling overcrowded. Brendan Fraser leads perfectly with a soft-spoken performance that captures so much of the films infectious warmth and positivity, even amongst the moral questions that the characters face.
Just A Little Bit Random 