Rental Family, a Hollywood movie released in late 2025 and streaming this spring on Hulu, raises universal questions about truth, faith, love, life, death, and belonging. Despite some flaws, the pro-life, pro-family message of the film stands out.

The plot of the movie, ostensibly about Japan, centers on Phillip Vanderploeg (Brendan Fraser), a struggling American actor in Tokyo who stumbles into a new gig filling one-off roles in people’s lives as fiance, mourner, interviewer, or whatever the clients of Tada Shinji’s (Hira Takehiro) “rental family” business require. In some assignments, Phillip meets each client only once or twice, helping him or her out of awkward situations or just keeping him or her company while playing video games. Having a warm body in the same room can be comforting, even if it’s a body for hire. One of the movie’s bit players, a part-time prostitute whom Phillip meets for trysts in love hotels, explains to Phillip that her flesh is for sale but her heart is (mostly) his. Phillip’s new line of work fits somewhere in this vein, drawing lines where none really exist.

Living a lie for an afternoon or evening becomes impossible for Phillip, though, when he is contracted to play the long-lost father of a little girl, Kawasaki Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman), whose mother wants to get her into a prestigious school in Tokyo. On paper, the job is easy money. Phillip is supposed to meet Mia a few times, attend the school entrance interview with her and her mother, and then disappear once his play-acting is no longer required. But Phillip, who lives a lonely life in a tiny Tokyo apartment, grows a bond with Mia, who, like kids everywhere, wants her parents to stay together and by her side. When Mia finds out that her “father” is just an extra in an elaborate ruse, she is bitterly disappointed. Phillip, for his part, realizes that fatherhood is not a temporary arrangement. It doesn’t come with a switch that can be turned off as circumstances change. He grows to care for Mia, confessing at the end of the film that his own childhood scars have surfaced, making it impossible for him to turn his back on a vulnerable little girl.

Parenthood is clearly being championed here. More broadly, the importance of sacrificing for other people rather than just telling them what they want to hear is the motif of the film. Being a rental father, friend, or any other form of human relationship is impossible, because humans are built for community, not mutual mendacity. Phillip and his co-workers begin to take risks for clients-become-friends, thereby undermining the rationale for the “family rental” business–i.e., the cheap convenience of an expedient lie. In crossing the line between fake companion and real friend, the rented actors penetrate to the heart of who people are on the inside, where the social conventions that apparently necessitate the “rental family” business model do not apply.

In a key sub-plot, Phillip takes an aging actor, Hasegawa Kikuo (Emoto Akira), to his boyhood hometown against the wishes of Hasegawa’s family. In the Amakusa islands, in the south of Honshu, Phillip and Hasegawa find buried in Hasegawa’s ruined and abandoned hamlet a time capsule containing photos of Hasegawa in his youth, standing beside a girl who later died just after he moved to Tokyo to pursue an acting career. That country girl, it becomes clear, means more to Hasegawa than any fame or honor he later won in the big city. Hasegawa is a renowned film star but he wants nothing more than to recover memories of his youth, when he was an unknown teenager in Amakusa. In many ways it is because Phillip, an outsider, can see the Hasegawa behind the film-star facade that the two men are able to take their perilous adventure into a secret past.

The Reality Beneath the Role

There are limits to the acumen of outsiders, however. Phillip, although a long-time Japan resident, does not put much stock in visits to Shinto shrines until, with Hasegawa in Amakusa, he learns that people in Japan believe in yaoyorozu no kami, the myriad divinities residing inside of every person and thing. For the first time, Phillip begins to bow and pray at shrines, and to bow more deeply to other people, realizing that he is bowing to something much greater than what he can see. The bow is not a social nicety but a profound expression of respect for the human person. Quietly, the producers and director of Rental Family have put into their movie one of the most touching expressions of human dignity I have seen on film.

The Japan context allows for wonderful revelations such as this, but in many ways the same context drags the film into a welter of clichés. In other words, despite the beautiful Amakusa backdrop and the visual artistry of virtually every other scene of the film, one unfortunate aspect of Rental Family is that it is set in Japan. To be sure, neither the title nor the plot device of a family rental service would likely have worked without the Japanese setting. Services dispatching actors to be companions, family members, and other such acquaintances do exist in Japan. But Rental Family traffics in a misguided trope about Japan, namely that people here are overly concerned with appearances and so turn to white lies and by-the-hour family members in order to keep them up.

The truth is much simpler. Japanese people tend to be both sensitive and shy. They are taught from a very young age to take other people’s feelings into account. It is a deep respect for the things of the heart, the mystery inside every one of us, that can lead some people to bend the truth in order to keep from wounding someone unduly. As someone who has lived in Japan for a number of years, I have witnessed Japanese society not as a recondite puzzle to be solved, as Rental Family posits, but as a place where human emotions stand taller than in many other places. Reading too deeply into critiques of Japanese culture, I would say, risks gravely distracting from the universality of the movie’s message.

In fine, one of the themes of Rental Family is that Phillip is a foreigner who cannot understand Japan, but the film need not have constrained its appeal so narrowly. This movie is not really about Japan or Japanese people, but about everyone who has a heart and a soul and who wants to know how those things work and feel in others. The complexities that Phillip discovers as he gets close to Hasegawa, Mia, and his other clients are not Japanese complexities, but human ones. The moral of the story is that human beings crave truth and real love, not imitations, regardless of the cultural and social forms human relationships assume on the outside.

The counterpart to this is that humans are moral beings. Their mere existence has infinite value. When they encounter other lives, both lives are changed forever. There are no casual acquaintances—every interaction hits the heart and moves us one way or another. There is no such thing, that is, as a rental family. As in Japan, so in every other country of the world. We want the real deal, and we will never settle for anything less.