Rental Family (2025, Japan/United States)

[Edgy MD]

An American actor, indifferently employed and adrift in Japan, gets a gig with an agency that hires him out to play roles in people's personal lives.

Unsurprisingly complications ensue.

Now streaming on Hulu.

[Edgy MD]

Well, I recommend a viewing.  It is equal-parts Japanese and Hollywood in tone.  It has some of the Tokyo metropolitan alienation themes of Lost in Translation, with less of the technological and pop-culture trappings people lose themselves in.

I gave it four stars out of five.  I might have given it 3 1/2 twenty years ago, but I am so disenchanted by contemporary films, that my standards have changed.  These days, I tend to find I am in the hands of (a) AI, (b) corporate delusion trying to cluelessly clone other successful films without a clue how or why they worked, or (c) a charismatic-but-insane guy who talked a major studio out of their money so he could use it to take a giant hit on their lawn.

But this felt like honest storytelling — with honest writers and actors and directors getting you from point A to point B with a nuance you almost forgot existed in films — and his has you predicting what happens next with only some confidence, while sometimes surprising you when you are dead-wrong.