4.5/5

Review by John P. Harvey.

Closing this year’s highly curated international lineup in the Capital Film Festival was the delightful crowd-pleaser Rental Family, its title deriving from the name of a Japanese business of a type that has — in the film, at least — become common in the past decade: offering stand-ins for absent friends and family.

Shinji (Takehiro Hira) owns a Tokyo service, Rental Family, that uses actors to provide surrogacy in family relationships.  He offers work to Phillip (Brendan Fraser), an American actor chasing parts beyond tv commercials.  At first, the idea of surrogate relationships strikes Phillip as deceptive.  Indeed, fellow actress Aiko (Mari Yamamoto) finds one of the services she carries out distasteful for just that reason.  And both Aiko and fellow actor Kota (Kimura Bun) doubt Phillip’s abilities.  But Shinji persuades Phillip to give it a try.

Phillip’s clients range from young schoolgirl Mia to lonely videogamers to the (fictional) famous movie star Kikuo Hasegawa (Akira Emoto), who is determined to return one last time to an old haunt while his memories remain.  In time, Phillip finds that the roles he takes for his clients offer them something profoundly genuine and important.  With that, though, comes the realisation that simply exiting those roles could cause much hurt.

Rental Family moves along at a good pace, engaging our interest in the fate of many of its characters.  They certainly vary a great deal and sometimes express strong emotions; yet the film itself is not only free of violence but maintains a comforting, Japanese gentility even in its most surprising moments.  Fraser plays the character of the slightly lost Phillip with an appealing gentleness that — in the film’s central relationship of abandoned daughter to surrogate father — young co-star Shannon Gorman, playing Mia, matches with her own gentle spirit of Japanese politeness even when his character angers hers.

This lovely film is an adventure for the heart.  It will return to cinemas everywhere at the end of 2025; look out for it.