“Rental Family” is a sensory delight on every level. Shot in Japan by director Hikari (Mitsuyo Miyazaki), who knows the country intimately, the film reflects her deep roots.

Born in Osaka and trained at USC’s Film School, she composes gorgeous frames that immerse us in Japan’s food, religion, landscapes, and customs. Our guide into this world is the “gaijin,” or outsider, Philip Vandarpleog, played with warmth and vulnerability by Brendan Fraser.

Though deeply rooted in Japanese culture and told largely in Japanese with English subtitles, the film grapples with universal questions:
What does a real human connection look like?
Who are we when our memories fade?
Why do we hurt the people we’re trying to protect?

Philip, a struggling actor, takes “extra” work as the resident “sad American” for an agency called Rental Family, which hires out surrogate relatives, coworkers, and companions. Alongside the brilliantly adaptable Taiko Nakajima (the excellent Mari Yamamoto), he plays everything from a hard-nosed journalist, to a dutiful son, to a mourner—even a groom for a bride desperate for an escape hatch.

The premise recalls “Peacock,” a recent Austrian film about a “companion for hire” service in Vienna. But where  “Peacock” takes a cynical, darkly comic approach, “Rental Family” offers a more sentimental, tear-jerking interpretation of the same emerging phenomenon.

That two such films appear simultaneously underscores our cultural obsession with authenticity in an era of curated online lives, and a wave of generational loneliness accelerated by the pandemic.
Philip’s primary clients are a single mother who needs a stand-in father to help her mixed-race daughter ace a private-school interview, and a daughter who hires him to pose as a Western journalist interviewing her father,  Kikuo Hasegawa (Akira Emoto), a revered actor with dementia who fears he’s been forgotten. Emoto, now 77, delivers a career-crowning performance.
“We sell emotion,” Philip’s boss (Takehiro Hira) tells him. “We help clients connect to what’s missing.”

But if the relationship is paid for, is it truly real? And what do the actors themselves gain—if anything—from these borrowed connections?

Nakajima justifies the charade by saying, “They look us in the eye and remind us we exist.”
Yet her most frequent role—playing the mistress who must apologize to the wife of an unfaithful husband, the agency’s most requested service, slowly erodes her dignity. We cheer when she finally pushes back.

Philip’s growing attachment to his two core clients prompts a warning from his boss: “That’s how this business works. All relationships have to end.” And when they do, the film’s emotional force lands squarely.

In the final twenty minutes, a young man two rows in front of me wept openly. Afterward, he said the father-son storyline hit him hard.

Like  “Peacock,” “Rental Family”  treats the  agency workers promulgating the deception with compassion. But this film places greater emphasis on Philip, along with his boss and coworkers, as they confront the voids in their own lives. How they do or don’t fill those voids provides both surprising narrative turns and a tender, if sentimental, emotional payoff.