I watched Rental Family recently and it’s one of those films that lingers for days afterwards. As a psychotherapist, I spend time sitting with people who talk about feeling lonely, often confused by that loneliness and sometimes ashamed of it. This film felt uncomfortably familiar.

The film is set in Tokyo, a city known for its order, politeness and emotional restraint. The film reflects a culture where social harmony is prized, but personal loneliness can remain carefully hidden. It made me think of the astonishing phenomena in Asia called hikikomori, referring to (mostly) men and boys who withdraw almost completely from society, often confining themselves to a single room for months or years at a time. They may spend most of their time gaming, online, sleeping, or consuming media, with minimal face-to-face contact. The Rental Family is an agency that allows individuals to hire others to act as family members or companions. Brendan Fraser plays Phillip, an unemployed actor, struggling to find work since his one brief moment of fame in a toothpaste commercial. He stumbles into a steady income working for a ‘rental family’ agency that offers bespoke role-playing services: a mourner at a funeral, a guest at a wedding, a fake son or father, a mistress who absorbs a wife’s rage. It sounds absurd on paper, but what the film actually shows is something deeply familiar to anyone who works therapeutically: people want to feel seen, heard and emotionally held.

From an attachment theory perspective, loneliness isn’t simply about the absence of people; it’s about the absence of secure attachment. Humans are wired from infancy to seek safe, responsive others. When our early attachment experiences are inconsistent, rejecting or overwhelming, we may grow into adults who function well on the surface but struggle to feel emotionally met. I often see clients who manage perfectly well at work because the rules of engagement are clear and predictable. Personal relationships, by contrast, are emotionally complex. Feelings run high, people can be ambiguous or inconsistent and behaviour doesn’t always align with words. For someone with an anxious or avoidant attachment style, this unpredictability can feel unbearable.

The rented relationships in the film work because they offer something simple and rare: attention, warmth, and consistency. Someone turns up. Someone listens. Someone remembers details. From a therapeutic point of view, this is not trivial – it is the foundation of emotional safety. A question the film keeps returning to is whether these connections ‘count’ if money is involved. As a therapist, that question lands close to home. Therapy is, after all, a paid relationship and yet it can be profoundly meaningful.

What struck me most is that these agencies actually exist in Japan. Rental Family doesn’t feel futuristic; it feels like a logical response to modern life. Families are becoming smaller, communities more fragmented, and neighbours often strangers. We pride ourselves on independence, productivity and busy lives – all while remaining biologically wired for connection.

Rental Family is not a film about people being strange or broken. It’s about ordinary people trying to meet ordinary human needs in a world that makes secure attachment increasingly difficult.

The film asks us to consider how much connection we expect people to manage on their own and what happens when they can’t. It reminds us that loneliness is not a personal failure, it is a human response to disconnection. And perhaps its most uncomfortable question is this: if so many people are willing to pay for warmth, presence and care, what does that say about how little of it we are offering each other for free?

 

Read more...