Film
Rental Family review: Secrets, lies and life lessons in wryly touching Tokyo dramedy★★★★
January 6, 2026 13:08
The setting being Japan and with Brendan Fraser the star, you’ll quickly guess that this comedy drama is another story of a gaijin stranger lost in that strange land but finding – wait for it – the truth within himself.
And if you’re thinking Bill Murray in Lost In Translation, well, yes, you do also get the expected picture-postcard tour. Crowded Tokyo cityscapes? Bullet train? Cherry blossom-carpeted landscape? Check, check, check.
But there the resemblance ends.
Unlike Murray’s uncomprehending celebrity tourist, expat American actor Phillip Vanderploeug (Fraser) is a fluent Japanese speaker after living in the country for years. His dreams of screen stardom have come to a dead end of sporadic roles as the token Westerner in television advertisements. Eking out his meagre existence, it’s a sign of Phillip’s desperation that he signs up to a puzzling new gig, no questions asked, as a mourner at a funeral, hired by a “rental family” agency on behalf of a mysterious client.
The ceremony turns out not to be quite what it seemed to be: the corpse lying in the coffin is perfectly alive, and has paid for the privilege of hearing testimony from his loving friends and family to give him new purpose in life.
Thus the tone is set for a story in which lies and deceit may be the veil for the greater truths that sometimes reveal themselves underneath.
After some hesitation, Phillip seizes upon his roles from the agency with relish, and particularly the good he can do with a little disregard for straightforward honesty.
He’s the groom for a bride who fears her conservative family would be unable to accept her real lover is another woman. A single mother enlists him to be the long-absent American father of her daughter Mia, only so that he can turn up for the entrance interviews at a prestigious school. And the devoted family of an ageing movie star, Kikuo, ask Phillip to pretend to be a film journalist who can indulge the old man with flattering attention before he loses his memory.
With the face of a bug-eyed Rock Hudson, Fraser is a good-hearted angel, at first flitting in and out of these people’s lives, until his emotional detachment is tested and eventually shattered as the deceit is exposed. “We lie because it’s easier than telling the truth,” someone declares at a pivotal moment in this salutary tale for our era, in which pretending to be something you’re not has never been easier, thanks to social media.
“No hugging, no learning” was the uncompromising mantra Larry David lived by when he ran the Seinfeld show 30 years ago. But now in our darker era, worries of mawkish sentimentality be damned, we need all the sweetness and light we can get.
Happily, just in time, along comes this comedy with an eminently digestible feast of hugs and life lessons.
Plus, if you can squeeze it down, a sizeable side order of the kind of wryly touching moments you’ll remember long after the credits have rolled.
To get more from Life, click here to sign up for our free Life newsletter.