When the roles we perform for other people start to feel more real than who we actually are, we arrive at the 
quiet ache at the center of Rental Family. Directed by Hikari, the film stars Brendan Fraser as an American actor in Tokyo who takes work with an agency that rents out stand-in grooms, fathers, friends, and mourners, and roughly half its dialogue is in Japanese. Eve and I found plenty to talk about. Eve traces the idolatry of self-image through the man who runs the agency. I take on the agency's apology service, which sells the look of repentance without the substance, and an aging film star whose last journey plays like a page out of Ecclesiastes. Eve closes with why grace, rather than brutal honesty, is the Christian answer rather than a kind lie.
Initial Impressions
Eve came into Rental Family more positively than I did. She was struck by the film's quiet visual craft: a recurring shot of Phillip looking out his apartment window into little vignettes of his neighbors' lives. The shot returns at the moment he decides to help Kikuo go home, when he finally steps out of observation and into someone else's story. She also praised Brendan Fraser's dramatic range, a callback to our episode on Pressure, where Rental Family first came up, and the way the film sets Tokyo's density against the countryside.
She was candid about the bad elements. Phillip's first job is a sham wedding. Aiko plays a mistress apologizing to wronged wives. There are intimate but non-sexual scenes with a prostitute, and a live pornography show that is implied but never shown. There's nothing seriously dirty on screen, but it isn't a movie to sit kids down in front of without some explanation. Still, Eve felt the film reckons with the negatives of its own premise, which gives it a more redemptive feel. Because roughly half the dialogue is in Japanese, she needed two viewings to catch everything.
I enjoyed the film too, and I'd watch it again, but a few elements unsettled me. I identified with Phillip as well, mostly through his servant's heart and his drive to turn a strange job into something that genuinely helps people. Fraser is outstanding, and I can't complain about anyone in the cast. Tada, the man who runs the agency, carries his emotion just under the surface of his eyes until his big reveal. I'll admit I was a little uncomfortable with how convincingly Fraser played a down-on-his-luck actor.
What distressed me most was Mia's mother's plan to have her daughter believe a hired actor was her real father. I honestly expected it to scar her for life. And Lola, the prostitute, was depicted more graphically than the story needed. The hooker with a heart of gold has been a trope since Pretty Woman, and after hearing from our missionaries in Salzburg, Austria, who rescue girls who have been trafficked, I can't look at it the same way. Eve read Lola differently, as the other side of the film's rental theme, and we didn't entirely agree.
To me, the score from Jón Þór Birgisson (performing as Jónsi) and Alex Somers did exactly what a score is supposed to do: it got me into the moment. Eve heard new-age textures more than classical ones. She found it introspective and moody, with tension and discordance that feel tied to the Tokyo setting and suit a film that is uncomfortable in places.
Lying to Yourself: The Idolatry of Self-Image in Rental Family
Eve's first theme grew out of Tada being caught in the very deception his company sells. His perfect home life turns out to be rented from his own service, an illusion he built for himself as much as for his clients. None of us has a perfect life, Eve pointed out, and pretending otherwise, whether at church, at work, or in our social circles, is its own kind of lie. She tied this to a passage her church recently studied:
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride in one's possessions—is not from the Father, but is from the world. And the world with its lust is passing away, but the one who does the will of God remains forever. (1 John 2:15–17)
She traced the same pattern through the agency's clients. There's the wedding staged so a bride's parents get the ceremony they want before she leaves for Canada. And there's Mia's mother, who builds a facade not only to boost her daughter's confidence but to get her into the right school. Every facade, Eve noted, exists because someone cares more about how they're perceived than about being authentic. From there she pointed to Isaiah's long warning to idol-builders (Isaiah 44:9–20), where craftsmen carve a god from the same wood they burn to cook dinner:
All who make idols are nothing, and what they treasure benefits no one. Their witnesses do not see or know anything, so they will be put to shame. Who makes a god or casts a metal image that benefits no one? Look, all its worshipers will be put to shame, and the craftsmen are humans. They all will assemble and stand; they all will be startled and put to shame. (Isaiah 44:9–11)
Tada, she said, built a perfect life and then worshiped the image of it. When it collapsed, he realized he had sacrificed real relationships for an illusion. Eve called it an awesome moment of repentance, though not in the Christian sense. He faces himself, and by the film's end the agency has changed how it operates.
Near the end, Phillip visits the shrine where Kikuo once prayed. When the curtain moves, he finds a mirror inside and chuckles at his own reflection. That image sent Eve straight to James:
But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. Because if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like someone looking at his own face in a mirror. For he looks at himself, goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of person he was. But the one who looks intently into the perfect law of freedom and perseveres in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer who works—this person will be blessed in what he does. (James 1:22–25)
Every major character in Rental Family gets some form of redemption, even Mia's mother, who apologizes to her daughter for lying. Eve took the mirror as a reminder that honest introspection is supposed to produce change. She closed the theme with Jesus' words to the scribes and Pharisees:
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of the bones of the dead and every kind of impurity. In the same way, on the outside you seem righteous to people, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. (Matthew 23:27–28)
I added that this thread runs deep in Japanese culture, which has a specific word for a person's public image as distinct from the private self. The agency's whole business lives in that gap. It creates a lie of the public life, where what you see is not what you get. I feel for anyone who falls in love and then discovers they fell for somebody completely different, or as Eve put it, the person you take home.
Counterfeit Repentance in Rental Family
That public-life lie led into the first of my two themes. Late in Rental Family, Aiko tells Phillip that apologies are the agency's most popular service, and by the end the agency has stopped offering them. The agency isn't made up, either; services like it operate in Japan. What it sells is a performance of sorrow, staged to satisfy a public image rather than to produce the sorrow that leads to redemption. It's the grown-up version of telling a child to apologize to his sister and hearing a flat “I'm sorry.” Scripture draws a sharp line between that and the real thing:
I now rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because your grief led to repentance. For you were grieved as God willed, so that you didn't experience any loss from us. For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, but worldly grief produces death. (2 Corinthians 7:9–10)
Worldly grief manages consequences, and it ends in death. Most of the apology jobs we see in Rental Family are Aiko playing a mistress for an unfaithful husband, and I watched those scenes thinking the spurned wife really isn't getting her money's worth.
Early in Rental Family, the service is also played for laughs. A man performs an apology before cardboard cutouts of his company's board while Tada plays the executive raging back at him. “Please forgive me! I'm garbage. Less than a cockroach, a disgrace to the company!” Tada fires back, “You're an insult to cockroaches!” Then comes the escalation: “I embezzled from our employee retirement funds!” As Eve pointed out, Tada takes a call from Phillip in the middle of it all.
Nobody benefits from that performance except the embezzler, who gets to feel he has admitted something and gotten it off his shoulders. It's all externalized, and about as useful as a jetpack on a fish. It'll lift him out of the water, but he's going to regret it.
Tear your hearts, not just your clothes, and return to the LORD your God. For he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in faithful love, and he relents from sending disaster. (Joel 2:13)
Repentance is supposed to reach the people who were harmed. Let's grant that people steeped in Japanese culture and Shinto aren't going to acknowledge that their sin wrongs God. This embezzler isn't even apologizing to the real people. His apology is a counterfeit, and a dark mirror of the gospel. It keeps the ritual of atonement, a substitute bearing the wrath so reconciliation can follow, and deletes the truth that makes atonement work, leaving everyone unabsolved and unchanged.
According to the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. (Hebrews 9:22)
That verse points to the one necessary shedding of blood, Christ as the perfect Lamb on the cross. Real confession requires honesty rather than a show:
If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9)
All Is Vanity: Ecclesiastes personified in Rental Family
My second theme came from a subplot I didn't expect to turn into Ecclesiastes, and I latched onto it partly because I knew Eve, whose favorite Old Testament book it is, would love it. In Rental Family, a daughter hires Phillip to pose as a journalist profiling her father, Kikuo, a once-famous film star now living with dementia. Kikuo mirrors the Teacher, a man who chased everything the world sells and came back to report that it was vapor. The Hebrew word means breath or mist, the thing you cannot grasp or keep, and Kikuo's dementia makes it literal: the vapor consumes even the memory of the vapor.
The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem. “Absolute futility,” says the Teacher. “Absolute futility. Everything is futile.” (Ecclesiastes 1:1–2)
Kikuo tells Phillip that his daughter, Masami, used to call him “the man on the screen.” When Phillip asks, “Do you regret it?” Kikuo answers, “Not at the time.” That's the sting of Ecclesiastes: the man who gained everything he wanted finds it empty.
For, just like the fool, there is no lasting remembrance of the wise, since in the days to come both will be forgotten. How is it that the wise person dies just like the fool? (Ecclesiastes 2:16)
Kikuo appeared in more than a hundred productions, and none of it bought him the one thing he wanted, which was to be remembered by somebody. His daughter understood that, which is why she hired Phillip in the first place. Kikuo understood it too, which is why he talks Phillip into a roughly 800-mile trip back to his childhood home in Amakusa. There he digs up a time capsule and remembers the first love he left behind when he went to Tokyo, who fell ill and died while he was gone. He kept what he should have abandoned and abandoned what he should have kept.
That ache for something that outlasts us is one God put there:
He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also put eternity in their hearts, but no one can discover the work God has done from beginning to end. (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
Every person knows there's something after this. Some say we simply cease to exist when the neurons stop firing, but I don't think people actually believe that. I think they talk themselves into it.
Ecclesiastes ends by pointing outside the self. It calls us to remember our Creator, and it closes on the fear of God and the coming judgment. Rental Family ends with Phillip gazing into that shrine mirror. The Teacher's call to seize the day is tethered to God as Giver and Judge, and the film's version, cut loose from that tether, is a fool's wisdom. Eve added that the film does show real turnarounds, which is the literal meaning of repentance. Its characters turn from their old paths. They just aren't turning toward God.
Grace, Not Brutal Honesty
Eve's closing theme took up a question with a long theological history: is there ever a redeemable reason for deception? In Rental Family, Mia's mother never meant to hurt her daughter, and Kikuo's daughter wanted her father to feel remembered and respected in his last years. Their intentions were good, even though the lies did real damage. Eve saw less of a lie in Phillip's time with Kikuo, since his interest in the man was genuine even if his name and profession were not.
Christians disagree about whether Scripture's condemnation of false witness and lying lips covers all deception or only selfish deception. Some point to the Hebrew midwives who lied to Pharaoh to protect the Hebrew boys, and to Rahab, who lied to protect the spies. I added David, who feigned madness to escape a king. Eve is linking two articles that argue opposite sides: The Gospel Coalition's Is It Ever Okay for a Christian to Lie? and Answers in Genesis's Is Lying Justified?
Eve leans toward the second. God is truth and cannot lie, and the father of lies is Satan. Scripture praises the midwives, Rahab, and David for what they did, and God gave them grace for their lies. That grace is no license to go looking for reasons to lie. Should we sin more so that grace may abound? Certainly not. We look instead for the graceful truth, because the Christian answer to a kind lie is grace, and brutal honesty tears people down as surely as the lies in this film do.
My dear brothers and sisters, understand this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger, for human anger does not accomplish God's righteousness. (James 1:19–20)
Eve walked through the old question of whether a dress makes a wife look fat. The brutal answer wounds for no reason. The graceful answer, “You look beautiful in that dress,” is no lie, and it speaks to what actually matters. When the truth would only get someone hurt, silence is always an option. I confessed that I tell those little white lies too, and I regret it every time, because they do damage somewhere down the road. That's where speaking the truth in love matters.
Eve applies the same rule to the everyday “How are you doing?” Answering “I'm fine” when you aren't is the same social mask the film is about. She answers “I'm blessed,” which is true even on hard days. Recently, a client heard her hesitate before saying it and asked further, and Eve ended up telling her about her father's Alzheimer's diagnosis. People who really care will notice, and we can be those people:
Therefore encourage one another and build each other up as you are already doing. Now we ask you, brothers and sisters, to give recognition to those who labor among you and lead you in the Lord and admonish you, and to regard them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves. And we exhort you, brothers and sisters: warn those who are idle, comfort the discouraged, help the weak, be patient with everyone. See to it that no one repays evil for evil to anyone, but always pursue what is good for one another and for all. Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks in everything; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. Don't stifle the Spirit. Don't despise prophecies, but test all things. Hold on to what is good. Stay away from every kind of evil. (1 Thessalonians 5:11–22)
None of that passage leaves room for the little white lie that makes someone feel better for a moment. Eve closed with one more verse:
No foul language should come from your mouth, but only what is good for building up someone in need, so that it gives grace to those who hear. (Ephesians 4:29)
Grace, Eve said, is how we forgive, how we speak, and how we tell the truth. And when we can't say something both true and kind, we can listen instead.
Conclusion
Eve liked where Rental Family lands, especially Phillip's restored friendship with Mia. He genuinely enjoyed being with her, and Eve thought the friendship was good for Mia too. I wish he'd had to work a little harder for it. Eve pointed out that Mia went in with fairly realistic expectations. At their very first meeting, she made Phillip pinky swear never to leave them again, on penalty of swallowing a thousand needles. I gulped out loud at that one, because, as Eve said, we all knew he was lying.
Rental Family isn't a Christian film, and it doesn't offer a Christian answer to the questions it raises. But it takes seriously the cost of building a life on illusion: self-image, apologies, legacy, and the small social lies we tell to get through the day. That makes for a rich conversation.
Are You Just Watching? is listener supported. Special thanks to our current patrons: Isaias Santillano, Stephen Brown II, and David Lefton, for their generous support. We can't continue to share critical thinking for the entertained Christian without your financial help, so please head on over to our Patreon page and become one of our supporting patrons! Prefer a one-time gift? You can also leave us a tip on Ko-fi — every bit helps keep the show going! What did you think of Rental Family? We would like to know, even if just your reactions to the trailer or the topics we shared in this episode. Or what general critical-thinking and entertainment thoughts or questions do you have? Would you like to suggest a movie or TV show for us to give a Christian movie review with critical thinking?Where to watch Rental Family
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