"Fraser plays Phillip, a hapless unemployed actor from the US who a few years previously came to Tokyo to do a goofy TV ad for toothpaste and, having no friends or family back home, simply stayed on. He lucks into a weird new source of income: working for a rental family, based on firms in Japan which really do offer bespoke therapeutic role-play services, such as errant spouses, deceased"
"finds himself having to be a dad to a little girl whose single mother needs a respectable father figure for an elite private school interview; the kid is told this is the guy who disappeared when she was a baby. And he is also to be effectively a mock son to an ageing actor, whose grownup daughter fears he is depressed; she hires Phillip as a phoney interviewer tasked with writing a flattering in-depth profile."
An unemployed American actor in Tokyo takes work with a rental-family service, portraying fabricated relatives for emotional or social needs. The film treats the rental-family premise as a vehicle for feelgood sentimentality, offering vacuous platitudes rather than critical insight into the ethics or consequences of such role-play. Performances and plotting lean toward implausibility and fatuousness, undermining both dramatic and comic potential. Earlier cinematic treatments of similar premises leaned into the unsettling or satirical implications; here the tone shifts toward complacent, saccharine resolution, which renders the story emotionally hollow and dramatically ineffective.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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