Brendan Fraser captured our hearts — on and off-screen — with his Oscar-winning performance in The Whale a few years ago when he made his big return to acting. Now the Brenaissance continues with another buzzworthy movie that’s destined to punch us right in the emotional gut. Rental Family premieres on the 2025 movie calendar on November 21, and critics are here to share their opinions on the upcoming dramedy.
Rental Family comes to us from celebrated female director Hikari, who is making her English-language feature directorial debut. Brendan Fraser stars as Phillip, an American actor living in Tokyo, where he’s hired to play friends or family members in customers’ real lives. CinemaBlend’s Sarah El-Mahmoud said the film had a deep emotional impact on her, and Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post agrees, saying this role suits Fraser perfectly. Oleksinski gives it 3.5 out of 4 stars and writes:
Rental Family is a heartwarming jewel of a movie that is a dazzling showcase of Japan’s urban and natural beauty, instead of the usual depiction of hoards of tourists surrounded by skyscrapers and lit by LEDs. Before the deadly serious The Whale, I didn’t know the actor could be so gentle and compassionate. Not to mention tortured. After all, he’d heroically swung in on ropes in multiple films. But it turns out he’s a softie with a direct line to our souls.
Brian Truitt of USA TODAY also rates the movie 3.5 stars out of 4, writing that the kindness and empathy that shone through in The Whale serves this new character well, as Phillip blossoms while forming connections with his clients in Rental Family. The critic says:
Three years after Fraser gave a wrenching, Oscar-winning performance in The Whale, he’s doling out the warm-and-fuzzies as a lovably awkward, Capra-esque Everyman in Japanese director Hikari’s dramedy Rental Family. It’s an outstanding, feel-good combination of East and West that depicts Japan's popular ‘rental family’ business – where actors play a client's parent, spouse, sibling or friend at events or in their personal life – while also nimbly exploring loneliness, identity and the importance of found family.
David Ehrlich of IndieWire gives it a B-, saying that Rental Family is about the hard part of being human but only displays a passing interest in exploring those things. Brendan Fraser’s performance mostly makes up for that ambivalence, as he helps drive home the message that hurt is better shared than buried, Ehrlich writes. More from his review:
Fraser plays every scene in Rental Family as if he’s suffering from a pain that he doesn’t know how to disguise. His smile is a wince, his wince is an open wound, and his wounds seem to run so deep that the movie doesn’t have the heart to even tell us what they are. It’s impossible to watch Fraser’s turn without thinking about the various injuries he’s suffered over the span of his career (physical and otherwise), and that extra-textual layer of personal history goes a long way towards fleshing out the underwritten character he inhabits here.
Jocelyn Noveck of the AP rates the film 2.5 out of 4 stars, writing that Brendan Fraser’s relatability and vulnerability help to keep Rental Family on the right side of the thin line between heartwarming and totally sappy. However, Hikari tries to put a neat bow on some of the morally ambiguous twists, which doesn’t always work. In Noveck’s words:
Some of these moments land more successfully than others. It’s not clear, though, exactly how we’re supposed to feel about the whole ‘rental family’ phenomenon. In some ways, people get what they want and nobody gets hurt… But other scenarios are fuzzier, and the broader message may simply be that genuine connection, that holy grail we all crave, can sometimes be found in the oddest of places — even in a bizarre no man’s land between fake relationships and real ones.
You can’t please everyone, though, and Alexander Mooney of Slant calls Rental Family “grotesque” in how it sands off all of its rough edges, sweeping the interesting parts of its concept under the rug as it ties off every loose end. Mooney writes:
This is a film whose comedy comes at the expense of its characters, and its drama at the expense of the audience. But in addition to its failures in form and construction, Rental Family is also freighted by the inherent compromise of being built around its resurgent star. In spite of the filmmakers’ best efforts to position their protagonist as a respectful and well-meaning outsider, the film can’t help but occupy that perspective in more profound ways. … Philip is a character defined by his masculine frailties and life of quotidian tragedies, jerry-rigged to elicit pity.
Rental Family may not get unanimously positive reviews, but it’s pretty close — the film holds 90% on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer. If you want to see the next movie in the Brenaissance, Rental Family hits theaters on Friday, November 21.
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