Rental Family movie: Brendan Fraser plays a family member for hire in this exploration of loneliness

Oscar-winning actor Brendan Fraser tends to stick out anywhere he goes but especially in Tokyo, where his hulking six-foot-three frame puts him literally head and shoulders above the crowd.

It’s an obvious visual metaphor but it’s an effective one. Fraser’s character, Phillip Vandarploeug, is a fish out of water. In a city with 14 million people, Phillip stands alone.

In Rental Family, Phillip is an American actor living and working in Japan. There’s little demand for his services beyond stereotypical white guy background roles and his most prominent gig has been for a toothpaste commercial.

In his small apartment, he stares out at the neighbours across the way, each contained in their own little boxes.

One day, he gets a job for a “rental family” agency, who provides actors to interact with people’s real lives. That first posting requires him to show up to a fake funeral and be a mourner.

Another in which he pretends to be a Canadian groom for a Japanese woman who throws a sham wedding for her parents, so she can be free of their control while giving them a story they can believe in and live with.

It might sound strange to us, but there’s a reason why these agencies exist in real life.

“As busy a place as Tokyo is, it’s a very lonesome place too, or it can be,” Fraser told The Nightly. “There’s certainly a population of those who feel bereft of company, such as the elderly whose children don’t visit them any longer, or aren’t in the picture, for instance.

“It stands to reason to hire somebody to act as a surrogate or a stand-in if only to listen to someone for an afternoon, or to sit still and let you brush their hair.

“It’s easy to insert a pejorative joke about this, but what I think is important is that you look a little deeper.”

The Japanese-American co-production was directed and co-written by filmmaker Hikari, who has worked on both sides of the Pacific including in TV shows such as Beef and Tokyo Vice.

Hikari said the service is needed in many cultures, not just in Japan, but that Japan doesn’t have options such as readily accessible therapy.

“If you’re depressed mentally or you have any kind of depression symptoms, then the Japanese people have this way of, ‘oh, you have some kind of issue, we don’t really want to talk about it’. They don’t even want to admit they are depressed.

“For that purpose, the rental family is handy because they’re just there to support you. It’s not professional, they don’t have a licence, but they’re there to listen, and that’s what therapists do.”

She recalled that when she moved in the late 1990s to Utah for university, she was the only Asian girl in the room. She felt isolated but then started to build a community of friends.

“That loneliness just disappeared for me, and I wanted to flip that idea,” she explained. “What does it look like to have somebody coming from America living in Japan?

“What does it look like for you to be in Tokyo, and I really wanted to have that journey for everyone who’s watching the movie to be in Phillip’s shoes and go on the journey with him.”

In the same way it might take a viewer to immerse into the world of family for hire, it does too for Phillip. But then he meets two clients who don’t know who he is.

One is Mia, a young girl whose mother hires Phillip to pretend to be Mia’s father for the purpose of getting into a private school. Mia believes Phillip to be her estranged dad and the two form a real bond.

The other is Kikuo, a retired actor whose daughter hires Phillip to pretend to be a journalist who’s interested in writing about his career. Spending time together, Phillip and Kikuo both gain something from the relationship.

He’s supposed to be there for them, but both clients offered something Phillip was missing too.

Rental Family may be set within this specific, quirky narrative framework, but what Hikari wanted to draw on was universal.

“I’m hoping the movie will resonate with the fact you’re not alone,” she said. “If you feel you are, then just look around, even if you don’t have the perfect relationship with your own family.

“Family is something you create.”

Rental Family is in cinemas on Boxing Day