deception

Review: Rental Family (2025)

a reel of film

Rental Family is a beautiful film set in Japan. It has Philip Vanderploeg (Brendan Fraser) as a fish-out-of-water American in Japan. The film starts with him as an underemployed actor who wants to do more. Although the characters say that Japanese culture is inscrutable to the non-Japanese, the film shrinks from presenting Japanese culture in caricatured stereotypes. An exception to that is the funeral that opens the movie. It presents the culture of a funeral in a cartoon situation. However, it offers a transition to introduce the audience to the chaotic world of rental families.

An enduring feeling in the film is one of loneliness. Looking across the way toward the neighbor’s apartments, Fraser could see the everyday lives of his neighbors as they raise children and celebrate days full of comfort and companionship. When he is not working, this view from his apartment returns to ground the film in the alienation of big-city life. Sometimes the people who are important to him are able to redeem that sadness and remind him of more recent joys.

At times, the film was filled with the manic energy of Fraser jumping between roles in lives of the clients of the agency he works for. That agency had rescued him from his boredom and depression. The agency is led by Shinji Taja (Takehiro Hira) who arranges situations for Fraser and his coworkers to join. Before each “acting gig,” Fraser would study the families as if he were studying for a role in a TV show. Although the situations that he joins are meant to deceive other family members, the relationships simulate reality and provide a rental family member that can fill some need. His first role is especially fraught where he is marrying a young woman. Fraser balks so his coworker, Aiko Nakajima (Mari Yamamoto), has to prevent a catastrophe by insisting on his participation. The intensity of that marriage commitment has an unexpected but affirming resolution.

Themes that are explored include dealing with memory, age and death. Another theme is commitment and responsibility. Fatherhood is a situation that replaces Fraser’s youth without a father by his acting as father to a young girl. Despite the simulated relationships that are dishonest, they can help people process difficult transitions. However, they also have a complementary effect on the actors that is an inevitable consequence.

One feature of the movie that I really enjoyed were the panoramic views of the world outside of Tokyo. The intermissions contrast the rectilinear, man-made world of a city with the natural, analog, beauty surrounding Tokyo. The natural world has a rhythm that is stable and calming. One sequence travels away from the city into a rural beauty near the ocean.

The online resources such as imdb.com categorize the movie as both a comedy and a tragedy. I definitely could identify the comedy because the bizarre situations that Fraser and his coworkers insert themselves into are really funny. As for tragedy, I don’t really identify that. Perhaps one could call the crisis in the movie as a tragedy, but that was a way of bringing the energy down a notch, not to announce failure and despair.

The movie starts with Fraser hitting bottom. He finds a way out through the rental agency and hits a euphoric phase of interacting as a for-rent family member. As things get stable, the euphoria levels off and Fraser has to make a decision of what he wants to be committed to. As the deception reaches a climax, the story flows into a crisis of confidence. It ends in a cheerful balance that is peaceful and comfortable. By the end of the moving the characters have had a chance to reflect on their lives and feel balance and hope.

The director and co-writer, Hikari, brought the characters to a stage of chaos and unpredictable situations that reminds me of the film Parasite (2019) which also has its characters in a whirlpool of deception. Rental Family doesn’t have them crash and instead they transition into a feeling of success and competence.

The Facebook Experience

I used to have a facebook account, but was very dissatisfied. I wasn’t comfortable with its addictive nature. Also, more often than not, I was self-conscious about adding information that didn’t fit social norms in times of stress.

It seemed that people preferred to submit clever graphics and people could leave the real “them” out. Just put up a facade–all is well. The last straw for me was when they suggested that I might be employed by a fellowship I belong to.

The reason the facebook topic came up with me again is that a course at IUPUI that I was thinking of taking included facebook postings as part of the coursework. I didn’t really want to get an account again. Hence the conflict.

 

Dr. BJ Fogg at Stanford University has studied persuasive technology. He calls it captology. His definition of persuasive is slightly different than the natural one. Persuasive means to cause a desired behavior. It isn’t about the cognitive persuasion to think about an issue a certain way. In his method, you pick a behavior you want to increase, make it easy to do and then prompt the behavior. The behaviors can be tiny such as to click a “Like” button or complex and have you to log in and update your content.

Facebook uses persuasive technology to increase income for the company. The users of facebook need to encourage people to advertise there. “Like” is a simple behavior. It seems to indicate that you’re engaged with a vendor’s products and services. On Veritasium, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag suggests that a “like” may not be what it seems.

The part where I get uncomfortable is that facebook has covert information that it can use to manipulate the interaction. People think of the website interacting solely with them, but with billions of users, facebook knows how people act in aggregate and can notice how to make a change with a tiny impact but is statistically significant. By combining these impacts, they can be manipulative and do it without being detected. They can manipulate the users and they can manipulate the advertisers.

One can’t be naive and think that facebook does things are solely for the benefit of its users. When one starts a post and then erases it, facebook’s software can notice. Since they know when this happens, they can find ways to encourage people add content more freely. They also target what you see to what they know you are more likely to attend to and not what you might value.

They knew that many of my friends belonged to a fellowship, so it was natural to blindly propose, to me who hadn’t listed an employer, that I might be employed in the same place.

With facebook they are capable of knowing more about you than you can imagine. They use that to make their shareholder’s wealthy. When I see an ad on YouTube, I know it is an advertisement. I can ignore it if I want. If you’re being persuaded to participate in advertising without knowing that you are being marketed to, that’s where the facebook experience is letting the smoke and mirrors conceal the real interaction. In “Captology and the Friendly Art of Persuasion” by Lynn Griener (*) comments “Advertisers may, for example, be able to get away with sneaky and intrusive tactics” and that “facebook must play it straight.” However, with huge data resources and insatiable stockholders, facebook’s straight can be pretty crooked.

(*) Greiner, Lynn. “Captology and the Friendly Art of Persuasion,” NetWorker, Fall 2009. doi: 10.1145/1600303.1600306