Rental Family

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…