Day: 21 December 2025

Like all twist-laced thrillers based on successful (if trashy) novels, to some there’ll be a level of expectation walking into a feature like The Housemaid. Thankfully, even if you are initiated with the turns and curveballs that author Freida McFadden laid out in her novel of the same name, screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshine (The Boys, The…

As outlandish as it sounds, in the early 1990s in Japan a rental family service (レンタル家族), or professional stand-in service, was founded to provide clients with actors who portray friends, family members, or coworkers for social events such as weddings, or to provide platonic companionship. In a city as big as Tokyo the idea of loneliness is…

In Rental Family, connection is never simple – it’s negotiated, performed, and deeply felt in the spaces between what’s said and what’s withheld. Takehiro Hira and Mari Yamamoto bring quiet precision and emotional intelligence to a film that lives in those in-between moments, portraying characters shaped as much by restraint as by longing. As Brendan…

In an age defined by curated selves and digital distance, Rental Family asks a quietly radical question: what if connection – even borrowed connection – could still save us? Directed with tender restraint by Hikari and anchored by a deeply humane performance from Brendan Fraser, the film follows a drifting American actor who finds work…