You might have heard of the “rental family” or “rental person,” a service in Japan in which actors for hire pose as friends or family. On the benign end of the spectrum, a rental person lines up with the client for a cute cafe, or fills a seat at a wedding; on the more dramatic end, she stands in as the client’s bride, clasping his hands before tearful parents.

It’s just the kind of cultural phenomenon that captures the imagination — whether real or not. A widely read 2018 New Yorker feature about Japan’s rental person industry was the center of a media firestorm when it came out that the story’s main subjects had deceived journalists, including those at NHK World-Japan, which had run a segment on rental agencies the same year. The public broadcaster was found to be at fault in an investigation by its own Broadcasting Ethics & Program Improvement Organization and issued an apology to viewers, and the venerated U.S. magazine decided to give back the National Magazine Award it had won for the feature.

Still, the story may be just too beguiling to let go. “Rental Family,” directed and co-written by the single-named Hikari, comes out in the U.S. on Nov. 21 and Japan on Feb. 27. It follows out-of-work actor Phillip, played by Brendan Fraser in his first major role since his 2023 Oscar win for “The Whale,” who is hired as the “token white guy” at an agency called Rental Family. Useful for the first time in years, Philip is hired to play a groom, a journalist on assignment and, most troublingly, a long-estranged father.