By Jason Osiason

Brendan Fraser is clearly passionate about this project, and its heart is in the right place. Rental Family gestures toward ideas of performance, loneliness, and cultural alienation but never pushes them in any challenging direction. What could have been a fascinating study of identity in dislocation instead settles for warmth and sentimentality. It is basic to the bone, like a hug that will not let go.

Fraser plays Phillip Vandarploeug, an American actor living in Tokyo whose career has stalled and whose sense of self is fading. He drifts from small commercials to awkward auditions until he stumbles into a job at a company that hires people to play family members for clients who need emotional stand-ins. The agency is run by Shinji, played by Takehiro Hira, a smooth businessman who believes everyone can buy connection, and his assistant Aiko, played by Mari Yamamoto, who handles clients with weary empathy.

Through a series of assignments Phillip becomes a temporary son, brother, and father. He befriends Kikuo Hasegawa, an aging actor played by Akira Emoto who longs to relive his glory days. He plays the father of Mia Kawasaki, a young girl portrayed by Shannon Mahina Gorman, whose mother hopes that a fake family photo will help her child get into a better school. These episodes sketch moments of tenderness and absurdity, but they rarely build toward anything deeper. The film flirts with the idea of how acting and real life blur but never dares to follow it to a darker or more complex place.

Fraser gives the film its only real weight. His gentle eyes and quiet humor suggest a man who is kind and lost, but the script keeps him stranded in repetition. He drifts from gig to gig without growth, always one scene away from genuine revelation that never arrives. Yamamoto is appealing as Aiko, though her character mostly exists to offer understanding smiles. Hira brings a slick charm to Shinji but his moral ambiguity is never explored.

The concept itself has power. A business built on renting intimacy should feel uncanny and haunting, yet the film plays it like a bittersweet travelogue. Tokyo is rendered with postcard prettiness rather than alienating wonder. The story glides from moment to moment with a politeness that dulls any tension.

By the final scenes Phillip seems changed, yet we never understand how or why. The film ends with an embrace meant to move us, but it feels forced and unearned. Rental Family wants to say something profound about how we perform love and belonging, but it never looks past the surface.

Brendan Fraser tries his best to hold it together, and his sincerity almost makes you want to believe in it. But the movie mistakes softness for depth and comfort for insight. It is a film about loneliness that is too afraid to sit with what loneliness really feels like. [C-]