Rent Family Review – Brendan Fraser Searches for Meaning in a Meaningless Japanese Role Playing Drama | film

forRendan Fraser is a suave, entertaining presence in this spontaneous, silly, no-nonsense film from Japanese actor-turned-director Hikari. It is bafflingly content with its sentimentality and sheer implausibility, rendering it as worthless and meaningless as drama and comedy.

Fraser plays Philip, an unemployed actor from the United States who a few years ago came to Tokyo to do a goofy TV commercial for toothpaste, had no friends or family back home, and simply stayed there. He’s lucky to have a strange new source of income: working for a “rental family,” which relies on companies in Japan that already offer on-demand therapeutic role-playing services, such as wayward spouses, dead loved ones, or unsatisfactory co-workers—people with whom to chat, mourn, or yell at for purposes of catharsis.

Philip, who has issues of his own with his father who ran out of his family when he was a child, finds himself having to father a young girl whose single mother needs a respectable father figure for an interview at an elite private school; The child was told that this was the man who disappeared when she was a child. He will also serve as the imaginary son of an aging actor, whose adult daughter fears he is depressed; She hires Philip as a pseudo interviewer tasked with writing an in-depth and interesting profile.

In fact, Werner Herzog has already made a film about it, Family Romance, LLC from 2019, in which Herzog goes out of his way to acknowledge, if only a little, how strange, dysfunctional, and fundamentally irresponsible the whole business is and how much things are likely to get worse once the fraud is discovered. Yorgos Lanthimos’s surrealist satire Alps dealt with a similar theme. I found both films uncertain, perhaps because there is something uncomfortable about adding a layer of role-playing to the histrionics found in fantasy films.

But this one has a serious tonal problem, wanting to turn everything feel good with some clichés about how we all play the roles. (Not so for us.) Philip has to impersonate an imaginary groom on the sham wedding day of a young woman who wants to hide a certain truth from her parents, and there is supposed comedy in the unfolding of the twists. It’s a reactionary patriarchal society for sure, but should this woman lie to her old mother and father like this? And if lying is the only way forward, shouldn’t the tone be something other than a twisted farce?

Then there’s the little girl who seems willing to risk breaking her heart by pretending to her that he’s her real father. He’s finally shown explaining and apologizing to her – but not to the poor older actor. There’s something fundamentally wrong about this smug, saccharine film.