‘Rental Family’ skims the surface of Japan’s rent-a-family industry

Fraser has a doe-eyed sincerity that clashes wonderfully with his bull-in-an-antique-shop presence. He’s a man of large physical and emotional proportions, and doesn’t need the gaudy prosthetics of The Whale to stand out in a country where he’s already larger than the average build. Phillip’s lumbering physicality is oafish, but sympathetic, so it’s hard not to immediately adore him. Seven years into his life in Tokyo, he still has a lost look about him, even though he speaks Japanese and knows his way around the city.

What Phillip doesn’t know, however, is how to truly make it in Japan. Not only has he hit his professional ceiling in an industry with few white roles—his last big commercial was several years ago—but he has occasional trouble navigating conversations, or so he says. The dialogue throughout Rental Family hints at a man who, despite his best efforts, doesn’t understand Japanese people, culture, or expectations, but these allegedly misunderstood tenets are seldom expressed by the film, so they become a hurdle only in theory.

The film is directed by Hikari, from a script she co-wrote with Stephen Blahut. Hikari was born in Osaka and moved to the United States at 17, while Blahut—Hikari’s cinematographer on 37 Seconds—has spent time in Japan, so the film undoubtedly comes from a place of understanding the fragile tightropes between two cultures. When Phillip first visits the offices of the rental family company, headed by the easygoing Shinji (Takehiro Hira), he has no grasp on why people might be eager to pay for stand-ins to help them skirt norms, or simply to simulate personal experiences. And yet, the unspoken rules of Japanese society are usually reduced to words mentioned in passing. The film features little sense of the emotional repression that might lead one to seek out such a service in the first place.

Misato Morita and Brendan Fraser in "Rental Family."

James Lisle/Searchlight Pictures

The story is bifurcated and loosely held together. After a rental family gig where Phllip nearly backs out of posing as a fake husband—but is talked back in by his stern but helpful coworker Aiko (Mari Yamamoto)—the deer-in-headlights gaijin is hired for two major jobs that require time and emotional investment. On one hand, he’s conscripted as a reporter to conduct a series of interviews with a forgotten screen actor, Kikuo Hasegawa (Akira Emoto), in order to make him feel wanted. On the other hand, he's made to pose as the estranged father of a precocious, mixed-race little girl, Mia Kawasaki (Shannon Mahina Gorman), so that her single mother (Shino Shinozaki) can get her into an elite private school. Both cases demand not just emotional clarity, but deception, since neither the elderly actor nor the little girl are made aware that Phillip isn’t real.

Unfortunately, the dual presence of these two plots leads to a lack of focus, Neither one receives the requisite attention it deserves, especially as Phillip grows more attached to both clients. When the line between fiction and reality begins to blur for him, the result is…well, nothing of note beyond exactly the beats you’d expect, since they’re all set up immediately. Rental Family may not be the kind of film that needs to be shocking, but signaling each emotional turn long before it happens removes the possibility of disappointment, of delightful surprise, and eventually, of investment in the question of what could be.

Hikari has proven a skillful dramatist in the past—especially on Netflix’s Beef—but the result here is largely plain, and has an unobtrusive visual approach verging on noncommittal. A tale of subterfuge in such unassuming packaging might require a more deft aesthetic hand, and something more complex than mere observation (and a calming color palette that, although it highlights Fraser’s blue eyes, does little to emphasize the film’s emotional dimensions). There’s no one way to tell a story, but the failures of Rental Family can’t help but bring to mind the successes of Werner Herzog’s Family Romance, LLC, which used lo-fi video to blur the lines between drama and documentary, a look drawn from the profession’s own invisible boundary between fiction and reality.

Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto, and Bun Kimura in "Rental Family."

James Lisle/Searchlight Pictures

Phillip occasionally mentions the messed up, manipulative nature of the job, but the film tends to arrive at neat, didactic conclusions without ever diving into the messier, borderline sadomasochistic side of the industry. The characters in Herzog’s film, for instance—real rent-a-family agents playing themselves on screen—even allegedly posed as their own clients for a New Yorker profile that subsequently needed the longest editor’s note you’ve ever seen. Despite the infinite possible permutations of a film involving Bond-like subterfuge at a mundane level (see also: Richard Linklater’s Hit Man), Rental Family aims low and just about clears its own bar, with its tale of a man who kind of, sort of doesn’t belong, but ends up finding his way by not really doing anything of particular note or interest. Fraser is, as one might expect, an absolute treat to watch, as yet another father figure pining for an estranged daughter, but he feels like borrowed talent the film doesn’t actually earn.