“We sell emotion. We play roles in clients’ lives. Parents, siblings, boyfriends, girlfriends, best friends. And help them connect to what’s missing. What I’m offering here is a chance to play roles with real meaning.”
After two great weeks, the 16th annual edition of the Twin Cities Film Festival (TCFF) has officially come to a close. The final film that I had an opportunity to screen here was “Rental Family” (2025), from director HIKARI (who worked on the 2023 Netflix limited series “Beef” and 2018’s “37 Seconds.”) I am excited to share my thoughts on it with all of you.
The plot follows an American expat actor named Phillip Vandarpleog (played by Brendan Fraser, who won the 2022 Academy Award for Best Actor for Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale,”) who moved to Tōkyō, Japan several years ago for a leading role in a toothpaste commercial. He constantly finds himself out of work, and after a last minute offer to be a token white guy at an “open casket” funeral works out, Phillip decides to look into the company behind the off kilter event, and is offered a job.
They are a Rental Family company, a common industry in Japan, that specializes in lending out their employees to perform a variety of tasks in their clients’ lives. These can include them putting on a fake wedding to get the client’s parents off her back, being a Shut-in’s Player 2 on “WWF Royal Rumble” for the Sega Dreamcast and helping men apologize for cheating on their wives. After talking to the CEO named Shinji (played by Emmy Award nominee Takehiro Hira, for his supporting role in the 2024 FX series “Shōgun,”) Phillip accepts his offer and gets to work.
The first of the two main roles that we see Phillip play in the film is as the long lost father of Mia (played by Shannon Mahina Gorman), whose mother is trying to appear like a normal family to get her daughter into a prestigious private elementary school. For being a first time child actor, Gorman delivers great work. The other story we see play out is when Phillip is asked to interview the Japanese actor Kikuo Hasegawa (played by Akira Emoto, who starred in Hideki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s 2016 film “Shin Godzilla” and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2018 film “Shoplifters”) by his daughter, so that he still feels appreciated in his old age. Emoto gives the most heartbreaking performance in the film, with one of his final scenes managing to make me tear up. Both stories serve to show the soft and tender side of Fraser’s acting skills, and leave the audience with a real sweet feeling in their hearts.
One last cast member that I would like to single out is Mari Yamamoto (who previously worked as a producer on HBO Max’s 2022-2024 show “Tokyo Vice” and starred in Apple TV+’s “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters”) and her role as Aiko. She unexpectedly gave one of the best performances I have seen all year, and can go from being laugh out loud hilarious to tender on a dime. She is not in as much of the movie as I would have liked, but what she does give is really astounding. I am looking forward to whatever roles Yamamoto picks next.
This film is one of my favorite movies of the year, and I would highly recommend it to all of you when it releases on November 21. My final rating for “Rental Family” is an uplifting 9/10.
