TIFF 2025 Review: Rental Family – “Getting to experience the ongoing revival of Brendan Fraser is a real treat.”

A struggling American actor living in Japan uses his role playing experience to assist those struggling with their personal lives.

 Trying to get taken seriously as an actor is not working for Phillip Vandarploeug (Brendan Fraser) as he has gotten stuck doing cartoonish commercials in Japan.  A unique and bizarre opportunity arises where Philip skeptically finds himself getting hired to do live performance art to enable clients to deceive loved ones for the greater good, or at least that is the intention.  Two significant storylines involve him pretending to be the father of a young girl attempting to get accepted at a prestigious school and taking on the persona of a journalist wanting to document the career of a well-known actor who fears being forgotten.  The web of lies gets entangled with real emotions, causing things to unravel in comedic and dramatic ways.

Like with Broker, where the characters are doing something despicable but in a likeable manner, filmmaker HIKARI has achieved a similar feat with Rental Family that essentially deals with a company that manipulates peoples’ emotions for their clients’ benefit.  Having a foreigner thrown into the middle of this allows for non-Japanese viewers to get a better understanding of the cultural taboos, which at first glance appear surreal and quirky.  The stigma placed upon dealing with mental health has resulted in this unconventional profession becoming a profitable workaround solution.

Getting to experience the ongoing revival of Brendan Fraser is a real treat as he can shift from being charming, bewildered, sad, compassionate, naive and happy without questioning the authenticity of the emotion.  Takehiro Hira is equally compelling as the entrepreneur with a questionable business and ethical standards.  Scenarios unfold that are meant to tug at the heartstrings, but the manipulation is forgivable as the production itself is not mean-spirited in nature.  Hope seeps through the deceit as the realization emerges that problems cannot be truly resolved through falsehoods.

The 50th Toronto International Film Festival runs September 4-14, 2025, and for more information visit tiff.net.    

Trevor Hogg is a freelance video editor and writer who currently resides in Canada; he can be found at LinkedIn.