Japan Watch: Rental Family (2025)

Watched:  07/05/2026

Format:  Hulu

Viewing:  First

Director:  Hikari

I initially said "no" when Jamie wanted to watch this movie.  

During COVID, I'd watched a lot of travel videos, and one thing I'd seen was Americans learning that, in Japan, you can rent people to role-play out scenarios.  This is an over simplification, but I can rent someone to act as if they were my grandfather - not my specific real life grandfather - but *a* grandfather who is generally nice to me.  A lot of people, of course, rent "girlfriends" - someone to go have dinner with them and ask them about their day.  That sort of thing.  

I am choosing not to pass judgment.  A whole country has normalized this, and while I want to say "hey... Japan?  You okay, buddy?" I also think maybe there's a market for this here.  Better than getting denied on dating apps.

From the title Rental Family (2025) and shots of an American in Japan - especially one featuring a 6'3" Brendan Fraser - I assumed this was about a sad American man in Japan who combats his loneliness by renting a full family.  I figured the movie would just be an indie feature about people being sad once Fraser finds out his rental family are just on a job and they all have to deal with reality.  Writes itself.  But if I could guess that - I just wasn't that interested.  

But, ha ha, that is NOT what the movie is about.  Instead, the movie inverts the premise I assumed as Fraser is an American actor in Japan who can't get ahead when he's hired by a company that provides rental people.  Of course it feels strange when he first tries it out.  When as an actor, no one else is acting, and after a faulty surprise gig, his first real job is as the groom in a wedding.  

And, yes, it is about a sad man in Japan who needs to make human contact - his only other contact really that with a prostitute.  And he makes contact with the people he works with.  Ie:  It is sort of a movie about a guy who is not at all cut out for the job he's taken.

He has co-workers.  Takehiro Hira (you will know from Godzilla Minus One) is the boss who recruits him.  His foxy other coworker is Mari Yamamoto (you will know from Monarch) who gived Fraser good advice.

We see Fraser on a few jobs, but the two the movie focuses on are as a reporter interviewing an aging actor - his daughter wanting him to feel he will be well remembered.  The other is as the white father of a child raised by a single mother, basically to fool school officials at a new school.

What's odd about this is that this is not how I understand the business to work in Japan.  It is not intended to pull one over on people - aside from, say, uninterested waitresses who don't know that isn't your girlfriend having dinner with you.  And it seems... deeply unethical to do so?  

Why does the daughter hire a fake writer instead of just hiring a real writer?  Does she not want her father remembered?  How is this better?  

What would the school do if they found out they'd been lied to about their student's parentage by an actor?  How does it help if the girl gets older and does track down her real dad to find out she's been lied to?  You're not bouncing back from that, mom.

And, honestly, while Tokyo is a city of 14 million - how many 6'3" gaijin are running around?  It just feels like a numbers game before Fraser is spotted again if the agency keeps sending him out on jobs where he *lies* about who he is.  And then trying to remember the context?

Anyway - this movie is a fairy tale.  It's about what it's about, and we kind of have to accept that.  But it reminds me a 90's studio movie trying to play in the sandbox of the character-first indie movie market.  Like, we will have a happy ending here.

I make it sound like I didn't like the movie, but I was more *confused* by it than anything.  I think there's an interesting idea there for sure, and Fraser is busily reminding us he's a compelling actor even with less-than-perfect material.  

The movie sort of lost me completely in the third act as Fraser decides to liberate the older gentleman, who he knows has memory problems, removing him from his home to take him to his birth home *in the woods* without telling the man's family where he is.  This is a *job*.  He has a boss, and his boss has a client in the man's daughter.  But he never *speaks* with the daughter as a client to even pitch taking the father to the old house.  He just steals the guy. 

I guess in the end, I just didn't think this movie made much sense/ was very well written.  It's very invested in the idea of people making real connections with customers, and seeing how the work makes people happy.  But it's not being paid to hang out act like you care about someone's Pokemon cards.  You're pretending to be their missing brother who happens to want to see your Pokemon cards, and they have no idea you're acting.

And so I didn't really get what the happy ending actually meant.  Were they planning to just keep lying about who they were to people?  

Maybe the sad version is the version I would have better understood or not felt was so contrived.  Maybe there's even more about Japan I don't understand than I already know I don't get.  Maybe there are people lying non-stop playing parents, cousins, boyfriends, etc...  as a paid service.  I literally don't know. 

There's a good story buried in this idea.  You can do people getting too attached and making mistakes.  But the movie has to earn those mistakes as something the audience relates to.  And Fraser is so believable as a very lonely man with a good heart, you want to buy it.  

One last thing - it seems like Fraser was seeing a prostitute, and the movie was making a point about the connection she may have with Fraser (or not have).  And then it just forgets her half-way through, and it feels like we lost a whole storyline in the editing room, one that might have given the movie more texture.