Rental Family, 2025. 

Written and Directed by Hikari.
Starring Brendan Fraser, Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto, Shannon Mahina Gorman, Akira Emoto, Paolo Andrea Di Pietro, Shinji Ozeki, Yuji Komatsu, Ryoko Osada, Gan Furukawa, Risa Kameda, Kana Kitty, Yuma Sonan, Nihi, and Shino Shinozaki.

SYNOPSIS:

An American actor in Tokyo struggles to find purpose until he lands an unusual gig: working for a Japanese “rental family” agency, playing stand-in roles for strangers. As he immerses himself in his clients’ worlds, he begins to form genuine bonds that blur the lines between performance and reality.

In Japan, there are oddball services that allow one to employ someone to play a role in their life or family. That’s the relatively cinematically unexplored concept of writer/director Hikari’s sophomore narrative feature Rental Family (the name of the service in the film), which, unsurprisingly, offers several ideas for further exploration. Some restraint and focus likely would have helped, considering that by the end, except for Brendan Fraser’s struggling actor who has made Japan his home, none of these characters are explored in any depth, and they merely serve as tools to manipulate the audience into crying emotionally.

It is somewhat maddening how often the film tries to raise the stakes from an emotional standpoint in the second half, as the whole narrative started to have the opposite effect on this critic and collapsed. The only element holding it together is the admittedly outstanding ensemble, led by a terrifically sincere Brendan Fraser, who is almost enough to overcome the structural and supporting character failings around him.

His Philip (who adopts a new identity with each client and scenario) is understandably apprehensive before joining the service, despite desperately needing work. This is a service that, on its face, sounds like it could be used for much more harm than good. However, his opinion is gradually swayed by the outcome of a façade marriage he takes part in, which allows the fake bride to run off to Canada with her girlfriend and live a life together, with her homophobic family under the impression that she is living in the heteronormative traditional housewife role that is expected of her. Yes, there is deception, but everyone is happy, and an oppressed person gets to live the life they want.

Philip’s next role is much more ethically questionable: a mother (Shino Shinozaki) with a rebellious daughter (Shannon Mahina Gorman, also fluent in English) believes that if she can reconnect Mia with her father, perhaps it will straighten her behavior out enough to pass an exam and be enrolled in a prestigious school that comes with several beneficial future opportunities. For Philip, the job is to be Kevin, Mia’s estranged father, who has a change of heart and returns to her life. Naturally, Mia is guarded, and Philip considers drawing the line before even taking on the job. Regarding the latter, that’s because the role involves the actor to make a promise that he will never leave Mia again, even though after three weeks and the exam is taken, the job will be fulfilled, and he will be inventing a story forcing him to return to America, essentially leaving the girl abandoned once more.

For as sweet as it is watching Philip/Kevin earn Mia’s trust, become involved in her schooling, and take her to places such as something called a Monster Cat Festival (a visually resplendent and colorful ceremonial parade, adding to the already existing beauty of Japanese sights and sounds on display) where the two of them wear themed-costumes for the occasion and paint their faces one can’t help but wonder why on earth the mother believes that this is a sound idea that might not potentially break their trust completely and leave her scarred down the road. Even if Mia does improve in school, what guarantee is there that it will stay once this false father leaves again, or, worse, she finds out the truth and doubles down on tensions between her and her mother? It is a baffling plan that never leaves room to get the mother’s perspective (her character doesn’t even get a name) since the narrative is centered on Philip.

That entails other roles Philip is fulfilling, such as providing company for a lonely, elderly actor (Akira Emoto), or becoming increasingly worried about the “apology” roles women find themselves tasked with. There are also scenes involving the various service employees and the ups and downs of their lives, as well as another subplot where Philip regularly sees and pays a woman to nurse his loneliness. And even though the film is critical of this service for some of the humiliating things women find themselves doing, the situation between Philip, Mia, and her mom is wrapped up too neatly, with the mother seemingly learning nothing and facing no fallout. This film needed to choose one job within the rental service and focus on that as the crux of the narrative. It’s also not that there is so much happening here, but that even with other supporting characters, the film feels the need to either raise the stakes or provide twisty reveals, forcing a response out of contrivance rather than organic storytelling.

The beats that Rental Family hits are wholly predictable; one can’t help but roll their eyes. There is a message regarding found family and the power of human connection that is admirable, and there is no denying the power of Brendan Fraser in this role (and the moving chemistry he develops with Shannon Mahina Gorman), but this is a story that is renting emotions rather than earning them.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist

Goldbeak (trailer) is a 90-minute 3D animated kids film. Although it came out in China in 2021 (original title: 老鹰抓小鸡), it’s taken an unusually long time to get distributed, sometimes pretending that its year of release is more recent. It was produced by Liang Zi Film and Nigel W. Tierney, directed by Tierney and Dong Long, and written by Robert N. Skir, Jeff Sloniker, and Vivian Yoon.

In a world of mildly anthropomorphized birds, Goldbeak is an orphaned eagle who’s raised by chickens in a rural village. He wants to fly, but most of the villagers don’t help. They treat him as an outsider and eventually kick him out. Accompanied by his adoptive sister Ratchet (a gadgeteer genius), he makes the journey to the capital, the creatively-named Avian City.

Along the way he finds a mentor hermit who teaches him to fly. It turns out that Goldbeak is the long-lost nephew of the city’s mayor. Then he wants to join the Eagle Scouts, an elite flying squad, but their leading member hates his guts. The mayor turns out to have sinister plans…

Uughhh. This film has set a new low for me. It’s not boring, it’s not bad, it’s just so… horribly average. Nothing’s unpredictable. You can see most of the plot points coming from miles away. Even if you’re a fan of birds of prey, the story simply isn’t rewarding. It’s like it was designed by committee.

Still, the animation is fine, as are the many bird designs. There’s a weird irony that birds are operating large, technologically advanced aircraft. And I couldn’t help but notice that they built their capital city in a location devoid of convenient natural resources.

The reason behind the final conflict has all the subtlety of a Captain Planet episode. The ending battle takes place at night, so it’s hard to tell what’s going on. The antagonist gets two solid minutes to blubber about how he didn’t have a choice. (Screw you, you were willfully evil!) Don’t bother with this film. I have no idea what the quality of the English dub is; the copy I watched was in Turkish with English subtitles.

So on to our next feature!

Dalia and the Red Book (trailer) is a 3D animated kids film that came out in Argentina in 2024 (Dalia y el libro rojo). It was written and directed by David Bisbano, and produced by Vista Sur Films and Mi Perro Producciones. It’s done in a combination of animation styles, the most obvious ones being computer animation and stop-motion.

Dalia is a girl who wants to become a popular author like her father, who passed away some time ago. Unfortunately she suffers from writer’s block. On her 12th birthday, she finds her father’s last unfinished novel, a manuscript written in a red book. Cloaked supernatural creatures also want it, and Dalia finds herself captured and taken into the world of the book, while carrying the actual book with her.

Inside, the world is a sparsely populated, multi-tiered city. There’s some kind of time limit before things cease to exist. The characters either want to escape the book, or want Dalia to finish it so that the story won’t be stuck anymore. Most of the few characters we meet have their own agendas. Dalia has a guardian there, a cloaked, goggled anthropomorphic goat. Her father had written him into the book as a gift on Dalia’s 5th birthday. It was this character who first caught my attention, and was why I tracked down this film. Alas, he’s one-dimensional, if very cool-looking!

Other anthro characters include a portly owl, several harpies, and a daring she-wolf antagonist with two swords. Her design is extremely tall and thin – I wasn’t sure what species of canine she was, until the subtitles mentioned it. (Apparently she was based on Dalia’s mother, so maybe Dalia’s father was a closet furry?)

The film is a little over 90 minutes long, and like the she-wolf, it feels thin and stretched. There’s not enough story to fill it, so the pace is slow, and many things are left unexplained. Like… the rules of the universe, the she-wolf’s motivations, things like that. It’s too bad, because unlike Goldbeak, this really feels like the creators put their artistic hearts into it. But it needed more.

Ultimately, it’s a story about Dalia finding her self-confidence to write, overcoming her creative block. My favorite scene was a short one about an hour into it. Dalia and the goat briefly meet a creature whose author never fully developed it, so it keeps changing forms. Artistically it was neat to watch, if fleeting. The best part of this film to me was its atmosphere. The city really feels other-worldly, they nailed that! Otherwise I’m not sure I can recommend it, except to the curious. The copy I watched was in Spanish with English subtitles, but there may be an English dub? In the U.S. it may be available through Amazon or Apple TV.

Story: Babloo returns from jail to find that Dabloo and Rinki are in love and planning to marry. He tries to turn his life around, but Ambika Prasad pulls him back in with a dangerous demand—to kill the party president.Review: In ‘Nishaanchi 2,’ Anurag Kashyap takes a small detour from his usual grit and turns his attention to the push-and-pull between relationships and power. The film still circles around redemption and revenge, but the tone is gentler for a Kashyap outing. It checks most of the boxes of an engaging watch and holds your attention, yet it never quite lifts off. The climax, especially, lands with a thud—it starts with promise and then loses steam, almost as if it could have been placed anywhere in the film without changing much. At nearly two and a half hours, the story spends a long stretch building toward this moment, only for it to feel oddly muted.The narrative picks up with Rinki (Vedika Pinto) trying to push her dancing talent forward, hopping from one audition to the next, while Dabloo (Aaishvary Thackeray) hunts for steady work to keep the household afloat after Babloo’s imprisonment. Rinki eventually grabs a shot at featuring in a music video. Around the same time, Babloo steps out of jail after a decade and immediately begins asking questions about Rinki. Dabloo stalls, unsure how to tell him about her relationship and her knowledge of the man behind their father’s death. Meanwhile, Ambika Prasad (Kumud Mishra) has climbed his way up the political ladder and now sits comfortably as a minister. When a notorious gangster is killed in a Noida encounter linked to Prasad, his party prepares to offer him up as the fall guy. Cornered, Prasad decides to track down Babloo for his sharpshooting skills—unaware that this move will completely shift the ground beneath him.‘Nishaanchi 2’ neatly ties up most of the loose threads from the first film and moves the action from Kanpur to Lucknow. The dialogue, the beat of the language, and the overall rhythm feel rooted in both cities, lending the film a grounded texture. This time, the story leans harder into the emotional knots between the brothers and their bond with Rinki. At heart, it’s still a commercial entertainer, and Kashyap clearly nods to the Bollywood revenge sagas of the ’70s and ’80s in his own peculiar way. Some of it clicks; some of it doesn’t. But there’s no denying that the eccentric characters keep the film alive. The second half also digs deeper into Babloo’s arc, which plays out well on screen. Yet the climax—Babloo discovering the truth about his father’s death and Manjari poisoning Ambika’s security team—feels strangely abrupt and slightly off-key.Aaishvary Thackeray is easily the revelation here. It’s hard to believe this is his debut—the control in his performance and his ability to switch between Dabloo and Babloo, two completely opposite personalities, is genuinely impressive. His body language, his dialect, his small mannerisms—he owns all of it. Vedika Pinto also finds stronger footing this time, benefiting from more screen time and delivering with ease. Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, as the shady cop Kamal Ajeeb, steals every scene he walks into, while Kumud Mishra’s Ambika Prasad is surprisingly underused. Monica Panwar brings a sharp confidence to Manjari. And yes, by the end, the film finally answers the lingering question—who exactly is Nishaanchi?In the end, ‘Nishaanchi 2’ leaves you with a nagging thought—did this story really need a second chapter? Viewed in hindsight, the two films could easily have been trimmed, tightened, and shaped into one sharper, more impactful narrative. There’s a good film buried in here, but it often feels stretched when it should have been sprinting. Hardcore Kashyap fans will still find plenty to chew on—the familiar flavours, the rough edges, the bursts of energy—but for the rest, this will settle somewhere in the middle of his filmography, neither a misfire nor a standout, just a film that passes by without leaving a mark.