Rental Family is a breezy and touching exploration into modern loneliness, with Brendan Fraser showing us once again why he’s such a compelling onscreen presence.

Modern loneliness is a weird thing that we as a society are grappling with. For all the tools and technology at our fingertips, forming genuine emotional bonds with people is harder than ever.

Five minutes into Rental Family, actor Phillip Vandarploeug (Brendan Fraser) is sitting by himself at a bar and silently commiserating about his dead-end career. He’s a middle-aged American man living in Tokyo who hit it big seven years ago with a popular dental commercial, only for things to have gone downhill since then. Now, he’s resigned to endless humiliating auditions where he’s either rejected, cast as a giant tree, or hired to be the token white guy.

A glass of brandy slides over to Phillip. It’s from the bartender. Phillip asks, “How did you know?”

The bartender replies with a simple “Your face.”

In a scene shortly after that, Phillip is alone in his apartment, a can of Strong Zero in hand, just watching the happy and fulfilled residents in the building across from him. He doesn’t say a word; he simply kanpais himself before tucking into his konbini sushi.

These two early scenes capture the essence of what makes Brendan Fraser such a compelling onscreen presence. With just his face, Fraser is able to convey everything Rental Family is trying to say – all while covering over most of its cracks. It also helps that he is shot as someone who simply doesn’t fit in Japan – literally and metaphorically. Watching his large frame blend in with the hustle and bustle of Tokyo is a fascinating contrast and says more about his isolation than any dialogue could.

With human connection becoming a commodity, the Japanese have turned it into a full-blown rent-a-family industry. As Phillip is an actor in desperate need of work – and happens to be a token white guy – he is perfect for Shinji’s (Takehiro Hira) Rental Family agency, which hires him to help give people the emotional connection they crave.

Initially confused by his first couple of gigs – first as a fake funeral mourner followed by a stint as a fake groom – Phillip becomes intrigued by the idea of giving people happiness. With therapy and mental health still stigmatised in Japan, why not provide that much-needed ray of sunshine to those who need it?

Phillip’s first few gigs are played for some quick laughs, but he quickly runs into some serious moral quandaries that arise when he forms a genuine connection with two clients. The first is a legendary but largely forgotten actor named Kikuo (Akira Emoto), who hires Phillip to pose as a journalist writing a retrospective article about his career before his memory goes. The second is a single mother who hires Phillip to pose as the father to her half-white 11-year-old daughter Mia (Shannon Gorman) in order to get her into a prestigious middle school.

After easing us into this world, director and co-screenwriter Hikari uses Kikuo and Mia to dig into some serious questions about the dicey nature of rental families. Is the “fake it ‘til you make it” schtick a sustainable long-term solution? What happens when the actor and/or client get too emotionally invested? Is it morally wrong to hire someone to fill the gaps in our lives?

To Hikari’s credit, Rental Family doesn’t shy away from these uncomfortable grey areas, but it really strains credulity in trying to answer them.

The idea of a single mother hiring Phillip to be Mia’s father for three weeks before he leaves forever is deeply troubling and straight-up awful parenting, even if the intentions came from a place of love. As for the Kikuo plot, it also doesn’t quite track because a real journalist wouldn’t do what Phillip did to write a story. Okay, Phillip is merely acting, but that just shows the lack of preparation he’s put in beforehand and it makes me wonder whether his lack of work over the years is simply because he’s a bad actor.

But despite these logic holes, Fraser’s performance goes a long way in papering them over and Rental Family is more focused on emotional plausibility over whether the puzzle pieces fit neatly. We never learn who Phillip is as a person before he came to Japan or what his deal is (aside from being lonely), but watching Phillip connect with both Mia and Kikuo strikes an honest chord because of how empathetic Fraser is as a performer. You simply buy into the lengths he’ll go to help Mia and Kikuo feel better, logic be damned, because this movie’s vibe is just breezy and it would feel weird if Phillip didn’t step up to help. Given how Phillip is ultimately an outsider in this country and his clients’ lives, it also feels fitting that he be given a backseat to the setting and everyone else’s drama.

Rental Family stops short of providing a firm answer on all those aforementioned uncomfortable questions. The obstacles are overcome relatively smoothly and everyone learns the correct lessons by the end. Is it a bit cheap? Perhaps, but this feels like a feature in Hikari’s script rather than a bug. She’s more interested in exploring the idea that we just want to be seen – literally and metaphorically – and there’s something to be said in her attempts to find something real and honest in a movie about an industry that’s built on fakery. Sometimes a bit of sappy positivity is preferable to cynical truths, and I can’t fault her for wanting to end things with the glass half-full rather than half-empty.

Rental Family is definitely not the best movie of 2025 – that accolade is being fiercely fought between two better films also about family and the difficulties of familial communication – but it may just be the one I connected with the most. It’s unabashedly tender and emotionally resonant in a way that made me feel seen. Maybe that’s Hikari’s greatest trick: Using a movie to make us feel something positive when we need it most, messiness and all.