For a film about people pretending to love each other, Rental Family is surprisingly sincere. Set in modern-day Tokyo, HIKARI’s latest project treads delicate territory — not just culturally, but emotionally — and somehow comes out the other side with tenderness, curiosity, and soul. It’s a film that could have easily leaned into satire or sentimentality. Instead, it offers something far more human: connection that’s complicated, earned, and often fleeting.

The concept is strange at first glance but grounded in a very real practice in Japan — agencies that allow people to “rent” actors to play friends, spouses, or relatives. No sex. No scams. Just pure emotional outsourcing. Into this quietly transactional world walks Phillip (Brendan Fraser, The Nut Job), a washed-up American actor stuck in Tokyo, best known for his stint as “Toothpaste Man” in a popular Japanese commercial. In desperate need of cash and even more desperate for purpose, he takes a job as a professional mourner. Then, things get weird. The funeral? Fake. The man in the coffin? Alive. And Phillip? Hired to play a sad American for ambiance.

Welcome to “Providing Perfect Happiness,” the agency that employs Phillip to fill emotional gaps in strangers’ lives. One day he’s posing as a fiancé to appease in-laws. The next, he’s pretending to be a journalist interviewing an aging celebrity. But the heart of the film rests in two relationships: one with a retired actor (Akira Emoto, Shin Godzilla) battling dementia, and the other with a precocious schoolgirl, Mia (newcomer Shannon Mahina Gorman), whose mother hires Phillip to pose as her absentee father.

It’s the Mia storyline that toes the riskiest ethical line — and the film knows it. What starts as awkward deception tiptoes into something warmer, more dangerous. As Mia begins to believe in the illusion, Phillip leans into it, not out of malice but because he’s starved for meaning. The emotional fallout is inevitable. But HIKARI doesn’t use that as an in for easy manipulation. Instead, she explores the fallout with grace, making space for remorse, growth, and the complicated truth that sometimes lies are born from love, not malice.

Fraser is well-cast here — a gentle, slightly faded presence who doesn’t force empathy but earns it. He doesn’t need the full-blown transformation of The Whale to make an impact. My feelings on his Oscar-winning role aside, this is a far better fit for him: charming, a little broken, deeply kind. You believe he’s the kind of guy who would let a job like this get under his skin.

But Rental Family belongs just as much — maybe more — to its supporting cast. Takehiro Hira (2024’s Shōgun) plays Shinji, the cool-headed agency owner who seems to understand the emotional stakes of this work better than anyone. Mari Yamamoto (Pachinko) shines as Phillip’s guarded colleague Aiko, hinting at her own silent grief. And Emoto? He’s wonderful. There’s a scene where Phillip and Kikuo, the dementia-stricken actor, escape on an impromptu road trip, and it’s one of the film’s most unexpectedly moving sequences. You think it’s going to be a farce. It isn’t.

Newcomer Gorman is utterly sincere — not in the precocious, overly scripted child-actor way, but in the way she reacts, listens, and carries the solemn pain of a child who has had to grow up too fast. Her scenes with Fraser are some of the most authentic in the film, and HIKARI lets them breathe, resisting the urge to over-explain or sentimentalize their dynamic.

Visually, the film is striking without showing off. Cinematographer Takurô Ishizaka gives Tokyo a crisp, organic glow, capturing both the isolation of its back alleys and the intimacy of crowded train rides. Jónsi and Alex Somers’ score swells with melancholic warmth — delicate, eerie, sometimes just a breath beneath a scene rather than an overt cue. The whole production feels empathetically engineered in the best way.

If Rental Family feels familiar in structure — a sad man finds joy through others — what makes it fresh is its cultural specificity and sensitive restraint. HIKARI (37 Seconds, Beef, Tokyo Vice) has an eye for human contradiction, and she avoids easy answers. The film doesn’t romanticize loneliness, but it doesn’t pathologize it either. Sometimes people hire family because they need to believe in something — in comfort, in ritual, in not being invisible.

That’s what sticks with you. Not the oddness of the premise, but the reflective moments where two people choose kindness in a pretend scenario that briefly becomes real. In a world obsessed with authenticity, Rental Family dares to ask if imitation, when done with care, might still have value.

This isn’t a film that screams for attention. It hums. It sneaks up on you. And as Phillip fades from the lives of the people he’s helped, you might find yourself wondering who you’d hire if given the chance — and why.