„Rental Family“ bietet einen unvoreingenommenen Blick auf die Zuneigung von Arbeitnehmern in Japan

*In Hikari’s new film, Brendan Fraser steps into the real-life industry of rented relatives, turning Tokyo from a city of solitude into one of connection.*

*Bilal Qureshi for Bloomberg News*

With cameras gliding through Tokyo’s cherry blossom trees and shoji-screened interiors, international filmmakers have long cast the city as a sprawling theater for loneliness. Its scale, techno-futurism and perceived foreignness have inspired a cinematic symphony of ennui, reflected in the dystopian projections of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner to more contemporary portraits of urban drift in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days.

Like many American millennials, I first saw Tokyo on-screen in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, where a jet-lagged Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray navigate an elusive and dreamy city of distant otherness. Their nocturnal misadventures and daytime boredom play out against views of the city’s soaring skyline framed by their hotel’s floor-to-ceiling windows.

In 2006, Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu set part of his Oscar-winning Babel in a Tokyo of strobe-lit nightclubs and skyscrapers where a deaf woman desperately searches for connection. Argentine-born French provocateur Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009) presents the neon city from the floating, out-of-body vantage point of a dead American tourist’s spirit after a drug trip gone wrong.

By contrast, Rental Family — a glossy Hollywood film starring Oscar winner Brendan Fraser — presents Tokyo as a bright, effervescent world of cozy neighborhoods. Based on a real but niche Japanese industry that rents out substitute family members, the film, which opened in the US on Nov. 21, follows Fraser as a struggling actor hired to play stand-in roles — friend, fiancé, father, even son — in the lives of strangers.

[Read the full article here.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-28/brendan-fraser-s-rental-family-explores-japan-s-trade-in-hired-affection?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc2NDMyNjI4OSwiZXhwIjoxNzY0OTMxMDg5LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUNkVZV1hLR0NURlQwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJEMzU0MUJFQjhBQUY0QkUwQkFBOUQzNkI3QjlCRjI4OCJ9.RJVHg_urIfM5eIbuxt3Z4_pyxvdgqvNW1aliqyZBwvQ)