Rental Family (2025) Review

American actor Phillip Vanderploeg is struggling out in Tokyo and he lands a rather unusal job working for a Japanese “rental family” agency. He then plays stand-in roles for strangers and begins to rediscover a purpose.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

In the opening scene we are very quickly shown that Phillip is a struggling actor, rushing to and audition which he doesn’t seem fully into and wondering if things are ever going to turn around for him or not. When he meets Shinji Tada everything would change with the job offer for the rental family business he runs.

So what is the rental family business? It’s where people can request someone to be a person in their life, either for a one off event, a weekly meet up or to help out with something important. The first job for Phillip being getting married! Yes that is right, a fake wedding for the bride but very real for everyone else. He almost blows it when his morals cause a lot of panic, despite knowing that overall he is truly helping the young woman with her life.

From this moment he realises that actually the characters he can be potraying will help the clients and allow him to be other people as well. The issue though is the long term jobs get to him and pretending to be Mia’s father becomes difficult as they both actually get attached, given the reason he is offered this job is by her mother who wants to get her into a private school. We then see his relationship with with retired actor Kikuo Hasegawa who has dementia is kept under constant watch by his daughter, Phillip poses as a journalist to help keep him entertained.

We also get to learn about how within Japan this type of hiring is rather common and that people will want to hire someone for all different reasons. One of the worst has to be Aiko and a lot of her jobs being a mistress apoligising to the wives of the unfaithful husbands which often results in her being physically assaulted. When Phillip learns of this type of job he tries to protect her but that is not what he wants.

I was truly engrossed from start to finish and I have to admit with the different stories running across each other I actually forgot his real name was Phillip at one point, and I felt as though that was a huge compliment to the story being told as quite frankly I feel as though he had also forgotten who he really was, I guess that was the point?

Another incredible part of this film for me personally was the shots in different parts of Tokyo, I had an amazing trip to Japan back in 2023 and this made me really think about some of the spots and landmarks that I was fortunate enough to visit. I loved the quote about Japan having more gods than vending machines, because they really do have vending machines everywhere! It truly manages to capture the culture and as we journey through it with an outsider, we learn as he does and that makes it very special.

Brendan Fraser has been on an increidble revival of his career and he continues that very nicely with this performance, which could even be better than that of his Oscar winning role for me. Shannon Mahina Gorman steals the scenes and is a joy to watch for such a young actress. Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto, Akira Emoto and Kimura Bun all offer incredible support and really help to create such a special gem of a film.