Rental Family: Brendan Fraser brings goofy charm to this restrained fish-out-of-water comedy

Director Hikari (known for the popular Netflix series Beef, 2023) shows off her range with the Tokyo-set Rental Family, which follows down-and-out American actor Phillip (played by Brendan Fraser) as he’s drafted by an agency that hires out companions. The film deftly traverses the comedy of Phillip’s less than graceful entrances into customers’ lives, the family dramas that he both interrupts and allays, and a critique of folly and fallibility amid the hyper-urbanised life that can prop up such a business. Hikari’s years of research into Japan’s real-life rental agency industry (there are nearly 300 such agencies in the country) gives the film a refreshing authenticity.

Phillip soon finds himself improvising a potpourri of stand-in roles and pseudorelationships for strangers a surrogate mourner at a fake funeral, a father, a gaming buddy, and an enthusiastic journalist tasked to profile a famous actor with dementia. Some of the rental customers feel like they’ve just walked out of a Koreeda Hirokazu film Shoplifters (2018) or Broker (2022).

The film is propelled by thoughtful performances by the ensemble cast, as the whirr of character vignettes sends Phillip oscillating between feelings of satisfaction and disgust towards his new job. Fraser, diligent in his delivery of Japanese dialogue (around half of his lines are in the language), is a magnetic force equal parts goofy, awkward, bumbling and genuine. Hikari’s directorial style is restrained; the camera remains a polite, disciplined sentinel keen to observe rather than investigate, more content to retreat than to entangle.

It is through Phillip’s encounter with mixed-race preteen Mia (played with aplomb by newcomer Shannon Gorman), to boost her chances to get into an elite school which prefers dual-parent households, that the film fully blossoms. To Mia, Phillip is an absent father, returned and her righteous bitterness gives way to an enviable sweetness as Phillip bonds with her. The inevitable betrayal arrives, and she explodes, “Why do adults always lie?”

The comment is perhaps the deepest the film goes in interrogating the ethics of the sprawling rental family’ enterprise. One might wish that the film’s other narrative threads were more ruthless, and Hikari more daring in prosecuting the messiness of each character portrait. By the end, though, the one character who feels underdeveloped is Phillip’s fellow rental agency employee Aiko (the enigmatic Yamamoto Mari). Her courage in forging a different path provides one of the film’s most satisfying twists but viewers may be left wondering how they’ve arrived there.

► Rental Family is in UK cinemas 16 January.