Rental Family – A film about loneliness, connection and attachment

I watched Rental Family last week and it’s one of those films that lingers for days afterwards. As a psychotherapist, I spend week after week 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 where people can hire others to act as family members or companions. Brendan Fraser plays Phillip, a hapless, unemployed American actor who has been living in Tokyo for years, struggling to find work since his one brief moment of fame in a toothpaste commercial. He stumbles into 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.

Loneliness isn’t about being on your own

One of the things I hear most often in therapy is: “I don’t know why I feel lonely — I’ve got people around me.” Rental Family captures this perfectly. The clients in the film aren’t necessarily isolated. Many have jobs, acquaintances, even families of their own. What they lack is a felt sense of emotional connection.

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.

Is it fake if it feels real?

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 makes the rental family relationships both comforting and troubling is that they remove relational risk. There is no fear of being “too much,” no chance of rejection, no messy negotiation of needs. For people with histories of emotional neglect, abandonment or disappointment, this can feel like a relief.

If closeness has historically led to pain, rejection or shame, then a relationship with clear boundaries and guaranteed responsiveness can feel safer than an authentic but unpredictable bond. In this sense, the rental family offers a kind of secure base on demand — soothing, but limited.

The film shows how rented connection can alleviate loneliness without the vulnerability required in long-term relationships. But it also hints at what is missing: mutuality, growth, and the possibility of being truly known.

What the film says about the world we’re living in

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, neighbours often strangers. We pride ourselves on independence, productivity and busy lives — all while remaining biologically wired for connection.

From an attachment lens, we are asking people to self-soothe in ways that contradict our nervous systems. When relational structures disappear, the need for attachment does not. The agency in the film feels less like a strange idea and more like a pragmatic solution to lives that leave little room for emotional dependency.

Could a rental family agency work in the UK?

I was so taken with the film that I briefly wondered whether this might be the job I’d like to do (when I grow up.!) Perhaps it’s the next iteration of therapy or dating apps, especially as AI proves it can’t quite replicate human presence.

We are hard-wired for connection. But I’m not sure how well this model would sit culturally in the UK. We often struggle to name emotional needs directly, preferring humour, understatement or self-reliance. Wanting a “rental family” might feel embarrassing or indulgent — too exposing.

There are also ethical risks. Where there is attachment, there is vulnerability. The film acknowledges the dangers of emotional entanglement for both clients and workers. Bonds are not neutral, they activate old patterns, longings and wounds.

That said, we already have versions of this idea: befriending services, support workers, companions for older adults and therapy itself. Perhaps the difference is that we disguise them in practical language. The real question may not be whether this would work, but whether we can be honest about how much people need connection.

Final thoughts

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?