In 2019, Werner Herzog — of the ““I consider the frequent denominator of the universe is just not concord; however chaos, hostility and homicide” Herzogs — made a scripted film concerning the proliferation of rental household companies in fashionable Japan. Titled “Household Romance, LLC,” it tells the story of a neighborhood actor who’s employed to be the daddy of a 12-year-old woman who not remembers her actual dad; over time, the road between efficiency and actuality blurs to the purpose that the protagonist suffers an existential disaster that leads him to query whether or not the corpses at funerals would possibly really be useless, and to marvel if his closest family members are simply random individuals who’ve been paid to carry out for him since start. The movie ends with the actor hiding from his personal baby, his sense of self endlessly destabilized on account of the opposite roles he’s performed.
This would possibly shock you to listen to, however Hikari’s “Rental Household” — a candy and twinkly Searchlight drama starring Brendan Fraser as a middle-aged American unhappy sack who moved to Tokyo for a toothpaste business, solely to spend the following seven years enjoying the token white man in a string of unmemorable initiatives — unfolds a bit in a different way. It is a good film: the type that’s lit brighter than a dentist’s workplace, scored by the lead singer of Sigur Rós (together with Alex Somers), and aimed in direction of a heart-stirring conclusion about empathy, isolation, and the facility that all of us need to have an effect on one another’s lives. It’s about the onerous areas of being human, but it surely solely shows a passing curiosity in exploring them.
For all of its comfortable and fuzziness, nonetheless, “Rental Household” is not any much less trustworthy than Herzog’s movie the place it issues — it simply takes a extra treacly street in direction of reaching the ecstatic fact. And on this case, a bit eyeroll-inducing bullshit goes a great distance. Identified for “37 Seconds” and her glorious work on “Tokyo Vice,” Hikari could also be too easy a storyteller to take pleasure in any explicitly self-reflexive shenanigans, however there’s one thing to be mentioned for emotional manipulation within the context of a film that celebrates the truth that emotions — and relationships — might be as actual as the assumption that we put money into them, even when just for some time.
One telling distinction between “Rental Household” and “Household Romance, LLC”: Right here, the coffin stuff comes in the beginning of the movie. Always apologizing to folks in lieu of being sorry for himself, Phil Vandarploeg (Fraser) is first launched operating late to an audition, and the following time we see him he’s actually enjoying a tree. He doesn’t appear to have any family members or hobbies, and his solely “good friend” is a bubbly intercourse employee who reappears all through the movie to assist Phil to make sense of the kayfabe intimacy he creates for his personal clientele. (I can’t bear in mind the final time a good American-ish film displayed such a constructive and dignified perspective on intercourse work).
So when Phil is employed — with none form of heads up — to play a mourner on the funeral of a person who’s really nonetheless alive, now we have a imprecise sense of why he’s tempted to lie down within the casket for a second after the service is over. Don’t fear, Phil! In stark distinction to Herzog’s model, this would be the story of somebody who finds their method again to actuality, and to meaningfully collaborating in life, be it his life or any person else’s.
Confused and intrigued by his gig as a paid visitor at a mock funeral (presumably probably the most attention-grabbing and significant performing job he’s had in a very long time), Phil finds himself as the latest full-time worker of Rental Household, which is without doubt one of the 300 or so companies of its form in Japan. Individuals are lonely, psychological well being is stigmatized, and — in a rustic the place merchandising machines promote the whole lot from corn chowder to used underwear — why shouldn’t you be capable of purchase a dollop of happiness?
There’s greater than a touch of irony to Rental Household’s slogan (“Offering True Happiness”), however they’re nice if you need somebody to clap for you at karaoke, come over to your home to play a co-op videogame, or — in a barely extra concerned fee — faux to be your Canadian groom for the course of a full conventional Shinto wedding ceremony so your small-minded dad and mom don’t know that you just’re a lesbian who’s shifting midway all over the world to be with one other girl.
Phil dutifully performs all three of these roles over the course of “Rental Household,” none of that are technically troublesome or morally unsound.
Within the course of, he even kinds a kinship together with his boss Shinji (Takehiro Hira), and a considerably pricklier bond together with his lovely co-worker Aiko (Mari Yamamoto), who’s employed for all types of feminine companionship gigs. Issues solely get difficult for Phil when a mom (Shino Shinozaki) commissions him to play the dad that her lovely 11-year-old daughter has by no means met. The woman’s identify is Mia (Shannon Gorman), she’s half-white, and she or he’s due for a household interview on the form of prestigious center faculty that can decide her whole future. The mother causes that Mia can have a greater probability to get in if her dad and mom attend the interview as a united entrance, and if Mia — who’s not informed that Phil is simply an actor — will get to know what it’s prefer to have a father for just a few weeks, effectively then all the higher.
That is virtually objectively horrible parenting on her mom’s half, after all, as — best-case situation — Mia goes to need to lose her “father” another time when Phil’s contract expires. However the relationship that Phil and Mia come to share is cute sufficient to shirk off the anti-logic of its design, and the what’s that girl THINKING? of all of it feeds into the film’s curious ambivalence in direction of the service that Phil’s firm offers. That ambivalence inevitably proves to be one thing of a efficiency unto itself (spoiler alert: “Rental Household” is just not a finger-wagging takedown of a distinct segment Japanese business), however Hikari wrestles with the problems of Phil’s job in good religion, and for all of her film’s handholding sentimentality, she makes an actual effort to acknowledge how the roles that we play in every others’ lives can turn into confused.
Mercifully, the gaijin of all of it isn’t used to poke enjoyable at Japanese customs, or to boost an eyebrow on the nation’s unorthodox resolution to the social disaster at hand. That Phil is an outsider — and relatively visibly so — lends added weight to the concept folks can all the time hope to recast themselves as they transfer by way of this life, and to the associated notion that the majority of us are merely in want of an viewers (and prepared to go anyplace in an effort to discover one).
These two concepts most explicitly braid collectively over the course of a subplot by which the household of an growing old and semi-forgotten Japanese actor (Akira Emoto as Kikuo) rent Phil to be “a movie journalist” who’s within the previous man’s story — to supply the actor a final gasp of consideration earlier than he forgets himself. The story thread is stretched rather a lot additional than it must be, and “Rental Household” is by some means usually overextended despite the fact that none of its scenes are given even the slightest probability to breathe; heavy on circumstance and light-weight on context, Hikari’s script tells us subsequent to nothing about who Phil was earlier than he got here to Japan in the hunt for different elements to play.
Be that as it might, Kikuo’s saga builds to an affecting gracenote that meaningfully re-centers the film on the notion that harm is healthier shared than buried; that it’s higher to position it in a residing vessel than to ditch it in a gap someplace. Fraser embodies that fact all too effectively.
An endearingly clear actor whose one hyper-legible emotion at a time strategy made him an ideal confederate for no matter Darren Aronofsky was going for with “The Whale,” Fraser performs each scene in “Rental Household” as if he’s affected by a ache that he doesn’t know find out how to disguise. His smile is a wince, his wince is an open wound, and his wounds appear to run so deep that the film doesn’t have the center to even inform us what they’re.
It’s unattainable to look at Fraser’s flip with out fascinated by the varied accidents he’s suffered over the span of his profession (bodily and in any other case), and that extra-textual layer of non-public historical past goes a great distance in direction of fleshing out the underwritten character he inhabits right here. His see-through display screen persona makes for the same benefit, because it permits Phil’s companies to completely cut up the distinction between the realness of his connection and the artifice of his have an effect on. His relationship with Mia feels actual as might be and obviously pretend abruptly, which is simply as effectively in a mild little film that acknowledges fact and efficiency as two sides of the identical coin.
Grade: B-
“Rental Household” premiered on the 2025 Toronto Worldwide Movie Pageant. Searchlight Photos will launch it in theaters on Friday, November 21.
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