Rental Family Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		4.0

Rental Family Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 16, 2026

Return with us now to the halcyon days of yesteryear, or at least to September 13, 1966, when a now largely forgotten sitcom called Occasional Wife premiered on NBC. In a kind of twist to Bud's situation at work in The Apartment, this series posited a junior executive named Peter Christopher (Michael Callan) whose imperious boss will only promote Christopher, a bachelor, if he gets married. Christopher, who doesn't really want to settle down, hires his upstairs neighbor Greta Patterson (Patricia Harty) to pretend to be his new spouse, and hilarity supposedly ensued. The show actually was relatively deftly written, at least for gimmick based sitcoms of that era, but its premise seems oddly prescient in a way when it comes to Rental Family. A supplement on this disc claims that "renting" people for various tasks actually began in the Edo period, when shopkeepers or merchants would hire fake customers to make their products seem popular, but the "real" rental industry in the nation began centuries later, in either the 80s or 90s depending on what source is cited. One way or the other, despite its historical imprimatur, quite a bit of Rental Family comes off as a (high gloss) sitcom itself, mixed with a liberal dose of dramedy to keep heartstrings continually taut from being pulled so relentlessly.

Phillip Vanderploeg (Brendan Fraser) is an expat actor living in Japan who has been scraping out a living with bit work, including in a variety of typically bizarre Japanese commercials. He's obviously a lonely, unsettled man, and an early vignette documents what might be called his Rear Window adjacent behavior in his tiny apartment as he spies on neighbors in a high rise across the way from his building, in what seems to simply be an attempt at some form of connection. His agent calls with a last minute gig one morning, and Phillip is somewhat surprised to find out he's been hired as a more or less extra at a bizarre "funeral" where the supposed dead guy isn't, and is instead getting a "preview" of what his actual service will be when he dies. That introduces Phillip to Shinji (Takehiro Hira), owner of a rental family business, and a guy who is on the hunt for a "token white man" to fill various assignments.

That then sends the film off on a series of vignette driven enterprises, with two main through lines being Phillip's "work" as the supposed father to little Mia (Shannon Mahina Gorman), whose mother needs a faux spouse to get her daughter into a tony school, as well as another assignment Phillip takes on as a supposed journalist interviewing elderly actor Kikuo Hasegawa (Akira Emoto), who is beginning to show signs of dementia, and whose daughter Masami (Sei Matobu), who wants her father's intact memories to be documented, but who also wants her ailing father to feel "recognized" in his old age. Both of these longer term assignments deliver the bulk of the film's rather rich emotional tapestry, with Phillip finding out that actually making meaningful connections is fraught with unexpected side effects, like ending up caring too much for these ostensible "clients".

Rental Family is a sweet, unassuming film that makes the most of Fraser's kind of inherently sweet "gentle giant" ambience. The film is arguably stuffed a little too full of sidebars, including a quasi-romance for Phillip with a prostitute named Lola (Tamae Ando), and another subplot involving rental family employee Aiko (Mari Yamamoto), whose own assignments put her in harm's way. Despite that brush with melodrama, the film is refreshingly free of a "villain", despite perhaps some initial hints that Shinji may not be the most honorable of people, and the "conflict" here is mostly interior, the struggle Phillip feels in purveying his acting talent to such seemingly duplicitous ends.

Rental Family Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Rental Family is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Disney / Buena Vista with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.00:1. The IMDb lists the Arri Alexa Mini and a 4K DI as the relevant data points. This is a beautifully sharp and well detailed presentation throughout, making abundant use of often quite beautiful (if urban) Japanese locations. The palette is especially vibrant throughout in the outdoor material in particular, and there are some evocatively (if maybe just slightly goofily) graded "love scenes" between Phillip and Lola that are drenched in pink. Fine detail on sets and costumes is typically excellent. A couple of the interstitial scenes of Phillip in his dimly lit apartment don't offer a wealth of shadow detail, and in fact a couple of them look just a little "milky" at times, with blacks more approximating gray. I noticed no egregious compression issues.

Rental Family Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Rental Family features a spry DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track that benefits from those aforementioned urban environments in terms of providing regular spill into the side and rear channels when Phillip is out and about in various crowds. A somewhat whimsical and relatively minimalist score also resides comfortably in the surround channels. Both Japanese and English are used throughout, and all dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly. The disc defaults to (removable) English subtitles for the Japanese language sections, but otherwise optional subtitles for the entire film are available in English, French and Spanish.

Rental Family Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Rental Family Revealed (HD; 10:34) is an enjoyable EPK with the usual allotment of interviews, behind the scenes footage and snippets from the film. Writer and director Hikari is prominently featured, and there's some interesting (if brief) data on Fraser having to learn Japanese for the film.


• Deleted / Extended Scenes (HD; 17:00)

A digital copy is also included and packaging features a slipcover.

Rental Family Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Occasional Wife became a surprise late in the season hit for NBC in 1967, after its cancellation had already been announced, and there was actually a bit of news in mid-1967 that the series would be returning for a second season as a mid-season replacement in 1967-68, something that never happened. Rental Family perhaps somewhat similarly didn't seem to have really explode at the box office and may therefore be ripe for rediscovery (or discovery, as the case may be) in this nice looking and sounding new Blu-ray release. This is a film without undue ambitions, which is actually a good thing, as it delivers its "small" story with both abundant humor and pathos, offering Brendan Fraser another unusual example to strut his distinctive performance chops. The supporting cast is also generally great, and youngster Shannon Mahina Gorman is a real standout in her first feature film. Technical merits are solid and the two supplements quite a bit of fun. Recommended.