TORONTO – In hindsight, moving to Tokyo was not the best career move for Phillip Vanderploeug. The Minnesota native, portrayed by Brendan Fraser, thought his newfound fame as the star of a popular Japanese toothpaste commercial could help him find consistent work as an actor in the asian nation. A few years in, as with many actors across the world, he’s still auditioning for everything and anything to land any role to make the slog somehow worth it. When his agent calls to offer him the role of the “bad American” at a funeral, he instinctively wants to turn it down, but the day rate is too hard to resist. And soon, Philip becomes sucked into a make-believe business at the heart of Hikari’s “Rental Family,” a world premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.
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Run by Shinji Tada (“Shōgun’s” Takehiro Hira), this rental family service provides actors or stand-ins to assist clients in all sorts of endeavors. It is, in fact, a real phenomenon in Japan. One employee at Shinji’s operation, Aiko Nakajima (“Tokyo Vice’s” Mari Yamamoto), spends most of her time pretending to be the apologetic mistress of cheating husbands. Other “actors” may pretend to be a wife, husband, or sibling to someone on an hourly basis.
After his initial easy gig as a mourner at a client’s fake funeral, Philip becomes skeptical of the next assignment: stand-in as the new husband for a single woman. Even after Shinji and Aiko explain how important this is to the bride’s family (it will effectively allow her to move out on her own without dishonoring her parents), Philip has to be coaxed to go through with the ceremony. He loves to act, but this feels all too real. At the end of the night, he learns why this client went through such an extravagant exercise in the first place, and it makes him reconsider. After a flat start, this is one of the first times Hikari and co-screenwriter Stephen Blahut’s morally challenging dramedy begins to coalesce.
Soon, Philip is embracing his new gig. There’s the single, shy thirtysomething adult who needs a best friend to play video games with and maybe coax him out of his apartment, and other one-shots that keep making him popular in Shinji’s world, but it’s two concurrent clients that set Philip on morally ambiguous paths. Clients who spur such an emotional connection, he tells his acting agent to stop submitting him for proper roles.
Mia Kawasaki (newcomer Shannon Gorman) is a talented and smart eight-year-old, but her single mother (Shino Shinozaki) is convinced she won’t land in the right preparatory school without having her father at the interview. A father who disappeared from their lives years ago. Philip is hired for three weeks to play the dad Mia has no memory of, and to help her mother ace the entry drill down. This is an unconventional request that should have given Shinji pause, but he’s seemingly ignorant of some of the intrinsic dangers of his business.
At the same time, Philip is asked by the daughter of one of Japan’s most famous actors, Kiku Hasegawa (played by the legendary Akira Emoto in his first Hollywood production), to pretend to be a film journalist interviewing him for a career retrospective. Kiku is no dummy; he immediately questions Philip’s publication, as he’s never heard of it. But he’s also lonely and looking for any excuse (or assistance) to escape the prison his majestic home has become.
As the weeks progress, Philip’s inherent kindness leads him to care too much for both Mia and Kiku. And it seems inevitable that he will do something that will put the “role,” the Rental Family company that pays his bills, and, potentially, his two clients, at risk. Meanwhile, Aiko goes through her own personal crisis as the requirements of her parts begin to take a toll. Even Shinji, who seemed willing to have his employees pull off any scenario if it’s lucrative enough, finally begins to question his lucrative creation.
It doesn’t take long to realize that, like the character he’s playing, Fraser may not have been the best actor for this particular role. He’s a steadfastly earnest performer, and you wonder if, on the page, Philip was meant to have a more charismatic demeanor to pull off the puzzle Hikari is trying to put together. But when the movie needs a gut punch, Fraser proves he can give the drama enough emotional depth to pull it across the finish line. It doesn’t hurt that Yamamoto absolutely pops off the screen, and Hasegawa is so good you begin to wonder why it took so long for any English or partially English-language production to cast him (or for him to say “yes” to such offers).
Despite credits that include directing multiple episodes of the aforementioned “Vice” or a black comedy thriller such as “Beef,” this material is actually right up Hikari’s alley. She balanced a distinct sentimental tone with grounded realism in her first feature, “37 Seconds.” A film about a twentysomething woman with cerebral palsy who dreams of becoming a Manga artist. That movie was completely in Japanese, however. As “Family” unfurls, you begin to wonder if portraying this world through an English-language perspective was not ideal. It often seems as though Hikari is being pulled toward a prespective that is simply not Japanese enough to provide a true cultural perspective. But, more importantly, Hikari knows how to push enough emotional buttons without the audience sensing they are being manipulated. And, for many, those talents mean “Rental Family” will lead to genuine tears. Whether anything substantive from that experience will resonate in the hours and days afterward, however, remains to be seen. [B-/C+]
“Rental Family” opens nationwide on Nov 21
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