Rental Family, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, has the kind of premise that just makes you assume it’s itching to get its audience sobbing.
Brendan Fraser plays an American actor in Tokyo who starts working as the “token white guy” at a firm that provides performers for real life scenarios. It stages funerals for those who want to hear how much they are loved, and offers up fake mistresses to apologize to housewives whose husbands are cheating.
Fraser’s despondent transplant finds new purpose in becoming a surrogate father for a little girl whose mother employs him as a stand-in for a school interview, and as a pal to an aging actor whose daughter wants someone to play a journalist interested in his career. Cue the waterworks.
However, Rental Family, directed by Hikari, displays an almost admirable amount of restraint in its tear jerking, opting for quieter moments of grace rather than overdone emotion. In fact, it’s so restrained that Fraser’s Phillip Vandarpleog is not much of a character at all, and you leave itching for more of his inner life.
Brendan Fraser / James Lisle/Searchlight Pictures
What we do know about Phillip is that when the story begins he has been living in Japan for seven years, having moved there for a toothpaste commercial where he is dressed up as a plaque-fighting superhero. Since then he’s been struggling to find parts, so he jumps when his agent calls with a gig to play “Sad American.” He’s confused when he walks in late to a funeral, and then the dead man is clearly alive.
This is one of the gambits provided by Rental Family, operated by Shinji (Takehiro Hira), which recruits Phillip for a full time role. Phillip is confused by this industry—which is real and has also been the subject of a Werner Herzog drama. He panics at the fake wedding where he’s supposed to be marrying a young woman who needs a way to leave her parents without hurting their feelings. But eventually Phillip gets the hand of it, and is especially drawn to two clients in particular.
The first is Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman), the young girl in need of a dad. Mia is initially resistant to meeting the person who she thinks is her absent father, but eventually (and almost too quickly) warms to Phillip’s good nature. Phillip also bonds with the legendary actor Kikuo (Akira Emoto), and his heart starts to break when he realizes his job will ultimately not allow him to be the father or friend he wants to be.
The screenplay by Hikari and Stephen Blahut, however, doesn’t spend all that much time digging into the uncomfortable facts of this kind of work, in part because it makes Phillip so earnestly good natured. Hikari and Blahut seem conscious of the fact that there’s a discomfort in having a white man be their lead of a movie set in Japan, so whenever possible they let Phillip take a backseat to everyone else’s drama. But he’s still their protagonist, and they could have afforded him just a touch more of a backstory.
You long for information about just how he landed that commercial in Japan or why he was drawn to being an actor. In fact, his interest in his craft while in this unique role is left almost completely unexplored. Rental Family avoids “pompous actor” stereotypes, but also doesn’t really want to explore what it means to be in that profession broadly.
Shannon Gorman and Brendan Fraser / James Lisle/Searchlight Pictures
It hampers Fraser’s otherwise lovely performance. The actor is back on the festival circuit for the first time since 2022 when his work in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale landed him an Academy Award. That was a performance almost made for Oscar clips, with multiple tearful monologues.
As Phillip, Fraser projects a consummate gentleness that endears you to this man even when the script makes you fill in so many blanks.
Hikari’s camera has a love for the bustle of Tokyo and she takes clear pleasure in putting Fraser in the landscape. It’s not just that he’s a white guy, it’s that he’s physically imposing, sticking out like a sore thumb wherever he goes, even in large crowds.
Still, this is less fish-out-of-water material than you might expect—another sign of Rental Family zigging where you think it might zag. But despite that glimmer of pleasant unconventionality, it leaves you wanting, just like a stand in for a real family member.
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