Rental Family

TIFF REVIEW: BY KURT MORRISON

September 14, 2025

4.5 OUT OF 5 STARS

Call it another Green Book or CODA or whatever you want, but Rental Family is easily the year’s feel good film from TIFF, as well as for 2025. It may or may not garner some awards attention - which I believe it certainly deserves - and if that is the case, then so be it because Rental Family is a truly wonderful film that checks off all the boxes that make for both a critical darling and a general audience hit.

Written and directed by Hikari (37 Seconds, Where We Begin), Rental Family is set in modern day Japan, where struggling American actor Phillip Vandarploeug, played by Canada’s own Oscar winner Brendan Fraser, feels his career and life slipping away from him, one failed audition at a time. He packs a larger than life presence and physicality in a city that itself feels crammed, bright and larger than life.

The film opens with him receiving a job opportunity at, of all things, a funeral. It acts as an almost sarcastically befitting introduction to our Phillip, because the career he once shined in seems like it is dying a slow death. Unbeknownst to him, said funeral becomes a springboard to an unorthodox opportunity working for a Japanese ‘rental family’ agency, playing stand-in roles in strangers' lives. As the ‘roles’ begin to come in steadily, Phillip begins to form genuine bonds with clients that blur the lines between performance and reality.

In his first leading role since his Oscar win for The Whale, Brendan Fraser captures a perfect mix of sincerity and hopefulness that brought tears to my eyes many-a-time throughout this film. Yes - Fraser is an Oscar winner, but this is a completely different role than that of Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale. Fraser’s Phillip towers over everyone in the city and speaks Japanese fluently, yet possesses a frailty to him and we believe that his confidence is dwindling, thanks in part to Fraser’s innate ability to emote. There is a loneliness in his eyes that feels authentic. There is still much to learn after 7 years in the country and writer/director Hikari explores this for Phillip without making it feel unauthentic. This tapping into the cultural difference between an American’s expectations vs the reality of Japanese norms is the icing on the cake and underlying tone to the entire film. The direction of Phillip’s character may seem very easy to figure out in terms of where the story is heading, it still packs an incredibly deep, emotional wallop up until the last frame.

With a lot of great films coming out in the next three months, Rental Family has a prime release date of November 21st here in Canada and The United States. My hope is that Fraser’s performance gathers steam going into awards season and we see him land another Best Actor nomination.

Speaking of awards season locks, my hope is that Japanese actor Akira Emoto lands a Best Supporting Actor nomination and win for his role as Kikuo Hasegawa. Kikuo’s family hires Phillip (Fraser) to play a fake Magazine Writer, who is writing about the actor's life while he is alive. Unknown to Phillip though, is the fact that Kikuo suffers from either dementia or Alzheimer's disease. The moments between Phillip and Kikuo are tender and present a dire conclusion to the relationship Phillip finds himself in, knowing he has been sent there to help the elderly man reach a sense of fulfillment before he passes. This plot line admittedly caught me off guard because the trailer doesn’t possess any aspect of it YET I felt this was the most fleshed out and best part of the film.

Rental Family is lighthearted and feels like the right kind of movie fort right now. In a world that feels a little heavy to live in, going to the cinema is supposed to be our chance to turn off our brains, have a laugh and have a cry, and this does that and so much more. Yes - the script becomes a little too agreeable at points and chooses not to make any hard decisions, but that is entirely okay. Hikari and Co. have made what should be a slow burn, snowball-style hit for Searchlight and Disney when it is released just before the American Thanksgiving Holiday weekend.