Searchlight Pictures on Tuesday released the trailer for Rental Family, its upcoming comedic drama that stars Brendan Fraser his first first major role since winning the Best Actor Oscar for The Whale in 2023.
The film, directed and co-written by Beef director Hikari, will have its world premiere at next month’s Toronto Film Festival ahead of a November 21, 2025 release date.
Fraser plays as a lonely, down-and-out American actor living in Tokyo who begins working for a Japanese “rental family” company to play various stand-in roles in other people’s lives. Along the way, he forges some surprising human connections and discovers unexpected joys within his built-in family.
“We sell emotion — we play roles in clients’ lives,” explains Shōgun‘s Takehiro Hira when Fraser interviews for his next “gig.” “…Girlfriends’ boyfriends, best friends, and help them connect with what’s missing.”
He eventually gets a role playing a girl’s father, and it changes everything.
Hikari wrote the script with Stephen Blahut, with Fraser saying at last year’s Red Sea Film Festival that Hikari’s “story about what it means to have a family as not being the one necessarily that we were born into, but whom we encounter and collect in our lives.”
Pachinko‘s Mari Yamamoto and Akira Emoto also star.
Producers are Eddie Vaisman and Julia Lebedev of Sight Unseen, Hikari and Shin Yamaguchi. Blahut, Tomo Koizumi, Jennifer Semler, Oren Moverman and Leonid Lebedev are executive producers.
Watch the trailer above.
