Rental Family (2025) ‘TIFF’ Movie Review: Hikari’s Tale of Cheap Emotional Gratification Lives Up To That Promise in its Own Execution

Should a film like “Rental Family”—about the tribulations of navigating a business built on hollow emotional manipulation—be commended or disparaged for practicing what it preaches? You could potentially make a favourable argument for a “sentimentally cheap on purpose” approach when the film in question exhibits some sort of irony or acidic bite of any kind, but Hikari’s second feature plays it all completely straight; the only end goal here is a steady stream of waterworks.

Any reaction to the contrary, therefore, may very well constitute a full admission of heartlessness, at which point your cave dwelling at the peak overlooking Whoville is being prepped for your indefinite stay as we speak. But in a way, the failure of “Rental Family” to evoke the same choked catharsis that its subjects seek for themselves is just as much an indictment of the film’s thinly sketched approach as the flawed business model that absorbs this niche market of Japanese society.

That business model, if you haven’t yet inferred, is the very real practice of hiring out actors to fill a personal role in the life of a client. Parental figures, admiring fans, company for lonely men needing a pal to beat at video games—all roles are on the table for any actor seeking the work and willing to commit to the illusion, and all such roles come to be offered to flailing American Actor Phillip Vandarploeug (Brendan Fraser).

Living in Japan for the past seven years with just enough success to scrape by in Tokyo, Vandarploeug is more than willing to take whatever role can pay the bills. When he meets Shinji (Takehiro Hira) at a mock-funeral for which Phillip has been engaged as the “token white guy,” Shinji sees in him the potential to round out his family rental business with a teammate suited to the underlying humanity that best sells the fantasy.

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Rental Family (2025) — A still from “Rental Family” (2025)

This, quite quickly, proves to be more than Phillip bargained for as the roles assigned to him involve deeper and deeper commitment to long-term emotional manipulation of unsuspecting clients. As he attempts to balance a false fatherly role to a half-American child (Shannon Marina Gorman) and the fake academic shadowing an aging actor (Akira Emoto) who laments being forgotten, “Rental Family” hits the crux of its examination of emotional cruelty, and also proves where Hikari as a storyteller is as out of her depth as the sweetly pudgy American she’s plopped into this milieu.

If “Rental Family” lives and dies by the strength of Fraser’s broad shoulders, then the film only barely skates by thanks to the performer’s unwavering sincerity. Effortlessly capable of communicating deep sadness without shedding a single tear, Fraser balances the warmth required of this character’s initial appeal to this business and the fracturing hesitation of a man who can’t look into a mirror without seeing himself digging further and further into a pit of perpetual solitude.

It’s a damn shame, then, that Hikari makes no effort to flesh out Fraser’s contributions with a character who demonstrates even the slightest inkling of a personal history that might fuel this profound state of loneliness.

It’s not that “Rental Family” needed to outright explain in awkward exposition why this American actor has been living alone on the other side of the world for over half a decade, but the film doesn’t even suggest that there’s any reason at all; Phillip Vandarploeug, like the characters he plays, exists merely as a thin facsimile of stock movie figures dignified by the tireless efforts of the man left to keep it all afloat, and the film as a result merely serves to amplify this penchant for “fill-in-the-blank feeling” at every possible turn.

“Rental Family,” despite its best efforts to curate an overwhelming swell of tears, routinely shows its own hand as every interaction merely seems orchestrated to lead to a conclusion telegraphed as far as the summit of Mount Fuji. Hikari knows what it takes to make an audience cry on paper, but at no point do her efforts come across as more than a performance that, like the service at its center, hardly even believes in itself.