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Rental Family is streaming in the United States on Hulu. Eligible bundle subscribers can also watch it through Hulu on Disney+; access varies by plan and region.
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Rental Family is a 2025 comedy-drama directed by the Japanese American filmmaker Hikari, who co-wrote the screenplay with Stephen Blahut, and released by Searchlight Pictures. Set in modern-day Tokyo, it draws on a real and quietly extraordinary Japanese phenomenon — agencies that hire actors to play stand-in family members, friends, and mourners in the lives of paying strangers — to tell a gentle, humane story about loneliness and the strange intimacy of performance.
Brendan Fraser stars as Phillip Vanderploeg, an underemployed American actor who has lived in Japan for seven years and is quietly adrift when a “rental family” agency recruits him. Hired first to pose as the long-absent father of a young girl named Mia, whose single mother is under mounting social and financial pressure, Phillip is drawn deeper into the lives he was only meant to playact, blurring the line between the roles he is paid to perform and the connections he genuinely craves. Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto, Akira Emoto, and newcomer Shannon Mahina Gorman fill out an ensemble rooted in the textures of contemporary Tokyo.
Premiering on the fall festival circuit, the film earned warm reviews as a tailor-made showcase for Fraser's particular brand of soulful, gentle-giant charisma in his first major leading role since his Oscar-winning turn in The Whale. Critics singled out its empathy and its delicate tonal balance of humor and melancholy. Rental Family is streaming on Hulu.
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