"Titled " Family Romance, LLC," it tells the story of a local actor who's hired to be the father of a 12-year-old girl who no longer remembers her real dad; over time, the line between performance and reality blurs to the point that the protagonist suffers an existential crisis that leads him to question whether the corpses at funerals might actually be dead, and to wonder if his closest relatives are just random people who've been paid to perform for him since birth."
"This is a nice movie: the kind that's lit brighter than a dentist's office, scored by the lead singer of Sigur Rós (along with Alex Somers), and aimed towards a heart-stirring conclusion about empathy, isolation, and the power that we all have to affect each other's lives. It's about the hard areas of being human, but it only displays a passing interest in exploring them."
"For all of its soft and fuzziness, however, "Rental Family" is no less honest than Herzog's film where it matters - it just takes a more treacly road towards reaching the ecstatic truth. And in this case, a little eyeroll-inducing bullshit goes a long way. Known for "37 Seconds" and her excellent work on "Tokyo Vice," Hikari may be too straightforward a storyteller to"
Werner Herzog's 2019 Family Romance, LLC dramatizes Japan's rental family industry through a local actor hired to play a girl's father, triggering blurred boundaries between performance and reality. The actor endures an existential crisis, questioning whether funeral corpses are truly dead and whether his closest relatives might be paid performers, culminating in him hiding from his child and losing a stable sense of self. Hikari's Rental Family stars Brendan Fraser as an expatriate actor in Tokyo and adopts a bright, sentimental tone, scored in part by Sigur Rós, emphasizing empathy, isolation, and the subtle power people hold to affect one another. Hikari's storytelling is straightforward and emotionally direct.
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