By George & Josh Bate
You’re invited to a party but don’t want to go alone. Your new partner wants to meet your parents but you’re afraid they’ll make a fool of you. You’re tired of seeing movies by yourself every weekend but your friends don’t like going to the movies. Thankfully, there’s a solution to all of these conundrums: rental family services staffed with actors who play parents, friends, spouses, and more for a price exist all over Japan (and also provide the perfect entry point into 2025’s most heartwarming movie).
From director and co-writer Hikari, Searchlight Pictures’ Rental Family stars Academy Award winner Brendan Fraser as Phillip Vandarploeug, an American actor living in Tokyo. Struggling to secure acting gigs, Phillip reluctantly agrees to work for a Japanese rental family service and begins to play stand-in roles in other people’s lives. What begins as a job to make ends meet soon evolves into something far more personal for Phillip as he develops unexpected connections with his clients that raise ethical questions and put his job on the line.
The HoloFiles recently had the chance to participate in a press conference with writer/director/producer Hikari, lead actor Brendan Fraser, and co-stars Mari Yamamoto, Takehiro Hira, Shannon Gorman, and Akira Emoto in which the team discussed their interest in exploring the concept of rental family services, how they researched actual rental family services to prepare for their roles, the takehome message they home audiences come away with, and more.
For Hikari, the existence of rental family services in Japan posed a variety of intriguing questions that eventually served as the basis for her film. “Why [does] this business exists?” Hikari posits. “What kind of people do exist in this service? And who presents these services to actors so that they can come in to help people who are in need? And, as we’re discovering [more about rental family services], there’s just so much more than we expected.”
One of these discoveries was that a film about rental family services could shine a light on mental health difficulties in Japan. “There is talk about mental issues in Japan,” Hikari said. “There’s talk about the epidemic of loneliness, the isolation, everything that technology has advanced.” Hikari continued, “All of it was just really gave us the inspiration to start digging in what the story’s about and what kind of story you want to tell. And that could potentially inspire audiences or give a certain message that we all collectively came together to share as one movie – to really stay positive and do whatever we can do in our lives, to really keep pushing forward no matter what happens.”
Such an unique premise with all sorts of embedded commentary interested star Brendan Fraser enough to join the project. Rental Family marks the Academy Award winning actor’s first starring role since winning the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in The Whale and sees Fraser take on a decidedly different role than in Darren Aronofsky’s film. “The opportunity to travel to Tokyo to make a movie. Dream job,” Fraser reflected. “And I found the script to be unique and wonderful in its premise. Renting family members? Well, what does this mean?”
Most of all though, it seems like the opportunity to work with Hikari was what drew Fraser to the project. I knew that she would be an excellent collaborator,” Fraser stated. “That she would bring together people who are really good at their jobs and bring out the best in them as a person. I just intuited that. That’s why I wanted to be a part of it. Because, let’s face it, there’s a lot of films being made out there. I’m kind of getting up there. And I want to be a part of projects that I really care about, that have something to say and something to give back to an audience. And this seemed to fit that bill.”
Rental Family certainly fits that bill. As of the writing of this article, the film stands as our favorite of 2025 and easily the year’s most heartwarming movie, something it achieves largely through the burgeoning bond between Fraser’s Phillip and Shannon Mahina Gorman’s Mia Kawasaki. In the film, Mia’s mother (played by Shino Shinozaki) hires Phillip to pose as Mia’s dad so that she can be accepted into a competitive school. What begins as transactional relationship, however, quickly transforms into a deeply moving connection between the faux father and daughter.
For Gorman, who makes her feature film debut in Rental family, the role posed challenges given how dissimilar her background is to her character Mia’s. “I think the most difficult thing about playing this role is that I’m from a big family,” Gorman said. “I’m treated like a princess at home, so I don’t really have that kind of, I don’t 100% understand how Mia’s feeling, but I have a friend close to that kind of environment, so I tried to learn. I didn’t talk to her about this, but I just tried to learn how she acts or how she talks about her own
mom. And I tried my best to get into this role and to learn all of these lines.”
Gorman apparently knew her lines so well and captured the character Mia so accurately that Fraser joked, “We did a rehearsal, and we quickly learned that we need to do less rehearsal with Shannon, because she already knew her job.”
Fraser and Gorman are joined by Mari Yamamoto, who plays Phillip’s rental family service colleague Aiko. To prep for her role, Yamamoto visited an actual rental family service and learned about the work entailed and impact reaped by such a job. “We decided to go visit a rental family, more like a company that provides a similar service,” Yamamoto recollected. “They call themselves the all-women handyman company…They get all these kinds of interesting requests and we found out that in a lot of cases, clients come to them with benign requirements like having a pee filter, or to try on this sportswear designing and run for an hour in the trapeze in Tokyo. But strange requests, then inevitably, all of them would lead to the client sort of confessing
that they just wanted companionship, and often they would become regulars. So that was a big insight for us, that this was a really necessary service in Japan, and the importance of it really resonated with us, and also how much purpose the people who work for the company find in doing this work.”
Takehiro Hira, who plays Phillip and Aiko’s boss Shinji Tada in the film, also had a similar experience in getting to observe an actual rental family service fist hand. “We went to research,” Hira said. “And we went to talk to
the people who are actually running the business, and then hearing the actual requests, put everything into context for us, hearing some old lady hiring a younger person to sleep in the next door so she would feel safe and secure at night, and things like that.”
It’s clear the extensive research paid off for the cast of Rental Family as every supporting performance beautifully aligns with the message and tone writer/director Hikari intended to achieve. One of these supporting performances in particular sneaks up on you before becoming the heart of Rental Family in stirring genuine emotion. That performance belongs to Akira Emoto, a legend of Japanese cinema. Emoto plays Kikuo Hasegawa, another rental family client, whose daughter hires Phillip to pretend to be a journalist to interview him. “I think Kikuo is a character that is very strict on himself,” Emoto reflected. “He’s very selfish. He’s also very greedy, and he doesn’t let people in. So I would say, meeting Phillip for Kikuo, this strictness and this sort of selfishness that he has, everything that he experienced with him went beyond that, and there was this compatibility between the two of them.”
There is certainly a compatibility between Phillip and Kikuo, which mirrors the off-screen bond between Fraser and Emoto. “I would say in a word that I was really charmed by who [Fraser] is as person,” Emoto stated. “He was so welcoming. He was very warm and open. And in his actual life, Brendan as a person is a very soft and very loving person. And with that, and with Hikari watching over us and seeing our acting, what was born, I believe, was a very pure result.”
Phillip’s growing relationships with Kikuo, Mia, and other clients had us in tears, and will likely elicit a similar response in many viewers. For Hikari, she hopes that the emotional response to the film will last far after the credits roll in helping people realize that they are not alone. “WhatI would love and what I hope that they’ll take away is that they’re not alone, you know? We are all here collectively, we’re all here together. And then this movie, Rental Family, will provide that idea that if you feel like you’re stuck in this world and you don’t feel like you have nobody to reach out to, you have to make that first step.”
Hikari continued, “Wee have a family that sometimes works and sometimes you just wanna stay away even though it’s your own family members. And then that’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with it. If that’s the case, then just send a goodbye, just be grateful for who you have, and then just look around and who’s your surround yourself is your mom, your best friend, your coworker, your neighbor, they all become your family member, right? So the community that we have is becoming a family. So just let’s take on that and just be appreciative. Pick up the phone and call your friends and then see what happens with it.”
Rental Family definitely leaves audiences with the beautiful message Hikari intended to convey. Her film is as lovely, gentle, and uplifting as cinema gets, featuring a message we all need to hear right now.
Rental Family is in theaters November 21, 2025
