There’s been a lot of 2025 movie releases that have moved me, but this weekend’s Rental Family has quickly risen up high among my favorites of the year. Not only is it the latest movie to come out of the “Brenaissance” following Brendan Fraser’s win at the 2023 Oscars for The Whale, it has a powerful message that has stuck with me since I got to watch the movie a month ago. The Rental Family cast told CinemaBlend about why it’s a real career highlight for each of them as well.
I’ve Seen Rental Family, And It Meant A Lot To Me
The movie has Fraser playing a struggling actor named Philip living in Tokyo, Japan who takes a job for a “rental family” service where he’s hired to play real roles in people’s lives. (And as it turns out, this is an actual service you can seek out in Japan!)
There’s two main roles the movie ends up following: one where he’s playing the long lost father to a young girl, and the other where he’s pretending to be a journalist documenting the life of a retired actor. Rental Family has been getting positive buzz, but I wasn’t expecting it to tear my heart open in such a profound way while watching it.
There’s a lot I could get into on the spoiler-y front, but without giving too much away, one thing that really stuck out to me is how it highlights how the make believe can sometimes be just as helpful to people as the truth and our established lives. Seeing Philip be there for his clients helps them emotionally deal with their lives and go through things they need to that they would have otherwise been without. I’d never hire a rental family service myself, but I found a parallel in the power of movies and TV.
Media and art has often been there for me in the loneliest of times, and Rental Family allowed me to see myself in these people as they sought to fill the gaps of their loneliness. There’s not a lot we can do about the times we live in where we’re somehow less connected as a people than ever, so I could understand how a rental family might be an attractive service to others. What I wasn’t expecting is how Philip also ends up benefitting for providing the service, too. The TLDR of it all: we all inherently need connection, and it’s hard to adjust to a world where that’s not a societal priority or given.
What The Rental Family Cast Told Me About What It Means To Them
When I spoke to the cast of the movie, I brought to their attention one standout line from Rental Family that I believe highlights my feelings on the movie: “I’m just an actor. I don’t know how to help people”. I read them the quote while asking about their experiences with seeing their projects have an impact on others. In response, Brendan Fraser gushed about what his latest movie means to him, saying this:
This is a movie that’s been getting a response from everyone who sees it. It’s a little bit different, but they all feel like they have connected somehow in a meaningful way, just in the same way that the clients in the world of this film connect with the providers.
His co-star Mari Yamamoto, who has been in two great Apple TV+ shows, Pachinko and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, plays one of the other actors who are part of the rental family service. She shared this emotional reaction to being in the new movie:
[When] I first read the script when I had just lost my dad, so it was so impactful reading. It just gave me so much hope in a really dark time. And, having finished the project and talking to people who have seen it, I’ve had like really tender conversations with people who say that it probably resonates so differently for people who have lost people close to them, you know? And, that meant so much to me because that’s what I felt. It gave me hope when I first felt that way. So hearing that it’s doing the same for people who see it means a lot to me.
Takehiro Hira, who’s famously in the acclaimed Shogun series, also added to the conversation. In his words:
I don’t really think about if I’m helping people when I act, but I guess seeing the end product like this one, it resonated with people across the board and it’s just amazing how it can affect people.
Rental Family is a feel-good movie, but it’s also particularly deep because it has emotional depth to provide to audiences about modern loneliness and the power of connection. You can see it in theaters this Friday, November 21.