At first glance, Rental Family is a welcome sight. A gentle crowd-pleaser (remember those?) with a comeback king of a star, being given a proper push by its distributor. Then you see the release date, “Brendan Fraser” printed above the title, and realise that Searchlight Pictures must have smelled blood in the awards season water when they picked up co-writer and director Hikari's (Tokyo Vice; Beef) debut Hollywood feature. Now, this strategy is hardly unusual, and Searchlight is exceptionally proficient at securing Academy Award nominations (last year it led the charge for A Complete Unknown and A Real Pain; the year before, Poor Things). The issue is not that Rental Family isn't up to its incoming awards push. The issue is that it's not up to much of anything.

The premise certainly hints at feel-good hijinks. Fraser's struggling Tokyo-based actor lands a gig with a local rental family service, standing in as a staged husband/friend/funeral mourner in the very real lives of his clients. This of course gives us the classic, first day on the job, I-can't-do-this sequence, rolling nicely into the always welcome, this-isn't-so-bad and this-could-actually-be-my-calling montage. Like many scripts that aim an alien real-world concept at their target audience, this first act set up is the most entertaining part. Once the novelty wears off, a compelling narrative, lighthearted or not, needs to emerge quickly.

Alas, when Rental Family reaches its A plot, the wheels come off. Asked to play the absent father of a young girl as a means of getting her into a private school that does not favour single mums, Fraser's reluctant “dad” is not quite reluctant enough, considering the strange and outright immoral nature of the request. The fact that this and other questionable rental family services are wrong only comes to a head at the predictable climax, as if some great lesson has been learned. Everything naturally ends in its right place for our lead “family”, but the journey that gets us there is transparent and uninteresting, relying on a wannabe cute, but in reality puzzling “father-daughter” relationship that carries no weight whatsoever.

Compounding these missteps is the use of the gaijin lens to shed light on this lesser known element of Japanese society. Fraser's actor may be a longtime resident who speaks the language, but by telling the story through his eyes, the character of Japan is hollowed out, becoming surface-level and somehow pointless. This is hardly a groundbreaking observation considering the history of western leads in Japanese settings. It's a shame, though not all hope is lost, as Hikari's B plot manages to shift away from it enough to flash the balance she was apparently going for. This time, Fraser's actor plays a journalist tasked with giving one last interview to a legendary but forgotten movie star, who is depressed and slowly dying. There is a spark between Fraser and Akira Emoto, with the latter stealing every scene he is in. The segment cultivates some semblance of an endearing relationship through character and cultural depth, while making better use of the cavalier tone.

Hikari is a talented filmmaker who no doubt has more to come, but though Rental Family is not without its charm, it remains a miss. Whether it has enough heart for Academy voters is yet to be seen, but come next year no one should be surprised to see it kicking around in the awards discussion.

Rental Family screened at Vancouver International Film Festival 2025 and BFI London Film Festival 2025. It will be released in UK cinemas on 9 January