Glasgow is the only city in Scotland with an extensive suburban train network and a subway. When I have a few hours, I take my time dawdling my way westbound from Queen Street, towards Helensborough, on the local-stopping train, concentrating on the views as the scenery switches from urban to industrial to historical to breathtaking, the train seeming to anticipate the West Highland Line beyond to the north. The most striking feature about the backgrounds and establishing shots in the exquisite part-English, part-subtitled-Japanese movie “Rental Family” (Searchlight Pictures), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, is the salad of trains. We glimpse the famous Shinkansen at Shin-Yokohama, but more of the trains are of the Glasgow variety within the Tokyo metropolitan area. The filmmakers are particularly fond of overground trains of the kind which have several doors per carriage and a single row of seating arranged lengthways along the windows on both sides with a large standing space in between. One particular shot which appears in different forms throughout the film is of a train snaking round a curved bend in the track with the Tokyo skyline in focus behind—the whole film can be considered a glorious commercial for Tokyo.
“I might be able to use you for something more than ‘Sad American,’” Shinji, the owner of Rental Family, an agency that provides actors for domestic roles, played by Takehiro Hira, tells Phillip, played by Brendan Fraser, who has most recently appeared in a commercial for toothpaste dressed as a superhero and brandishing a foam toothbrush as tall as him. “So what do you think we do?” he asks. “You sell people?” asks Phillip. “No,” Shinji replies. “We sell emotion. We play roles in a client’s life.” Of course in America, “they could just get a therapist,” but in Japan “mental health issues are stigmatised.” In any case, “we need a token white guy.” And, compared with toothpaste, “I’m offering you a chance to play roles with real meaning.” Phillip’s first job is as a bridegroom. He has a panic attack—“It’s a lie,” he says. “I’m messing with people’s lives.” But the reason the bride has hired him is that she has a female lover. “The parents get the memory they want,” argues one of Shinji’s team, “and the bride gets her freedom.” The father of the bride agrees. “That was a beautiful wedding,” he says, beaming. After the little hiccup, Phillip gets busy and is in prolific demand.
The film can be considered a study of architectural design. Immediately after this scene, as the two women embrace and Phillip softly closes the door after leaving their room, the hotel building itself is seen from the outside and is made to dissolve, moment by moment, into the Tokyo skyline. (There are many such skyscraper hotels in Tokyo.) And an earlier shot still from Phillip’s small apartment room absorbs the whole of the facade of the mirror-image block next door, forgotten open curtains providing tantalising life-in-the-moment snapshots of the world inside. Transportation infrastructure—bridges as well as stations and trains—temples, intimate restaurants, schools, offices, and Tokyo’s iconic skyline over and over, as if to remind us of the symphony of architecture required to create it, occasionally bustling but consistently delicate; conversations are hushed, as is the music which features shimmering piano, often played very fast but always softly, crescendos and decrescendos marginal, and the muted chimes of tubular bells.
“Rental Family” is one of those films which is much better than the trailer (which loses the sense of the picture by playing the comedy too hard, almost as if someone in a different department at Searchlight Pictures didn’t understand the work of art they were trying to sell) and feels shorter than its two-hour duration. Phillip’s two major assignments pan out in parallel, like an architectural firm working on two major projects at once. One is as the father of a young girl—Mia—whose mother intends her to be accepted into an exclusive school. The other is as a writer preparing the biography of an actor—who is not interesting enough to be selected as a project by a serious writer—paid for by his daughter. “I’m Kevin,” Phillip tells Mia. “I’m your father.” Mr Fraser captures Phillip’s discomfort in rehearsing this creepy line over and over before their first meeting. But, in a painfully drawn-out moment of exceptional filmmaking, the moral shakiness of the whole endeavour lingers; “Promise you won’t leave us again,” begs Mia. “She doesn’t hate you,” Shinji says later. “She hates the man you’re playing.”
The natural history of both these graceful encounters—space doesn’t allow digression into the second—is that Phillip develops attachment to the subject, who doesn’t know that the new person in their lives is being subversively paid by the hour to be there. In a scene involving face painting, which should be corny but isn’t, we feel a relationship emerging far beyond that for which Mia’s mother is paying. “Dad listens to me,” Mia tells her mum. “You just tell me what to do.” “I didn’t hire you to lecture me on how to raise my child,” Mia’s mum says, before contacting the agency to terminate the contract.
Detachment is the business model for Rental Family, the agency, and boundaries its rules; “Rental Family,” the movie, is asking, well, what if you can’t detach? What if you follow the wishes of the subject rather than the client, more especially if that subject is elderly with the onset of dementia or a small child? It is not political in message, nor personal. “All relationships have to end,” Shinji says. “Then you move on. There’s always someone else. You’ll get used to it.”
Adam Poole
23rd January 2026
If you are interested in viewing this screening, please book your tickets here
