Rental Family

The Architecture of Loneliness

There is a specific, untranslatable texture to modern isolation—a silence so loud it requires a script to drown it out. In *Rental Family*, director HIKARI does not merely observe this silence; she monetizes it, deconstructs it, and ultimately, forgives it. Following her searing debut *37 Seconds* and her work on *Beef*, HIKARI returns with a film that could have easily slipped into the cynical territory of Yorgos Lanthimos’s *Alps*. Instead, she delivers a tender, humanist inquiry into the lies we tell to survive, anchored by a performance from Brendan Fraser that is less an act of transformation than one of profound revelation.



The premise is ripe for satire but played for soul. Fraser acts as Phillip, a washed-up American actor in Tokyo whose career has flatlined since a toothpaste commercial years ago. He is the ultimate *gaijin*—a ghost haunting a city that politely refuses to acknowledge him. When he stumbles into employment at a "rental family" agency, a real-world Japanese industry where actors are hired to play surrogate relatives, the film finds its meta-textual heartbeat. Phillip is paid to be the "token white guy," the distant uncle, or the grieving friend.

HIKARI’s visual language here is striking for its restraint. She eschews the neon-soaked, rain-slicked cyberpunk aesthetic that Western directors typically impose on Tokyo. Instead, working with cinematographer Takurô Ishizaka, she captures the city in flat, unforgiving daylight. We see the clutter of Phillip’s tiny apartment and the sterile beige of the agency’s office. This lack of cinematic glamour forces us to focus on the human architecture: the slump of Fraser’s shoulders and the terrifying vulnerability in his eyes.



The film’s brilliance lies in how it blurs the line between the transactional and the genuine. As Phillip takes on the role of a father to a young girl, Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman), and a confidant to an elderly man with dementia, Kikuo (Akira Emoto), the "performance" begins to bleed into reality. Fraser is extraordinary here. Unlike the prosthetic-heavy physical imposition of *The Whale*, this performance is stripped bare. He utilizes his natural, battered warmth—that specific "puppy dog" quality that has aged into a weary gentleness—to show a man realizing that his fake relationships are the only real things he has.

The narrative reaches its emotional apex not in a grand monologue, but in a quiet pilgrimage. The sequence where Phillip visits the shrine Kikuo frequented—only to find a mirror where a deity should be—encapsulates the film's thesis. It is a confrontation with the Self. In a world of rented intimacy, the only person you cannot hire a stand-in for is yourself.



*Rental Family* argues that performative empathy, if practiced long enough, might just become the real thing. It suggests that "family" is not a biological default but a series of choices—an act of showing up, even if you were initially paid to do so. In an era of cinema often obsessed with irony and detachment, HIKARI has crafted a film that dares to be earnestly, uncomfortably sincere. It is a quiet triumph, reminding us that sometimes, we have to pretend to be human before we can remember how to actually be one.