Fraser plays a hapless Tokyo-based actor working for a firm that offers bespoke therapeutic role-play services in director Hikari’s silly and saccharine film
B
rendan Fraser is a bland and ingratiating presence in this glib, silly and pointless film from Japanese actor turned director Hikari. It is bafflingly complacent in its sentimentality and its sheer, fatuous implausibility, which makes it valueless and meaningless as drama and comedy.
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 loved ones or unsatisfactory co-workers – people who can be chatted with, or mourned, or yelled at for cathartic purposes.
Phillip, who has issues of his own with a father who ran out on his family when he was a kid, 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.
