Rental Family

 

Truth is not always plausible.
— Luigi Pirandello 

Rental Family stages loneliness not as a pathological exception but as a widespread condition of contemporary existence. Its rarefied framing, orderly and almost aseptic interiors, suggest that absence is not merely the lack of people but a failure of recognition. It is not enough to be surrounded by individuals; one must be seen, named, called by name. 

The idea of “family members for rent” — so distant from many Western cultures — initially appears as an ethical anomaly. Paying someone to simulate a bond seems to degrade the authenticity of human relationships. Yet the film overturns this perspective: what begins as artifice may generate real effects. 

Among the most significant episodes is the simulation of a wedding arranged for a young woman about to leave for Canada, where she will be able to live her same-sex relationship freely. The ceremony is a construction, a conscious theater, and yet it contains an act of care: offering her parents a reassuring image before the definitive separation. Here fiction does not deny truth; it accompanies it, protects it, creates a transitional space for it. 

In another case, a woman is hired to present herself as a mistress and ask forgiveness from a betrayed wife in place of the unfaithful man. Guilt is delegated, embodied by an actress of sorrow. It is a scene that calls into question the very idea of responsibility: what matters is not so much who committed the wrong, but the necessity of giving pain a face, a voice, a ritual form that allows the wound to be named. 

Even more radical is the episode of the rented father, requested to secure a little girl’s admission to a school that does not accept children from couples lacking both parents. Here fiction becomes a response to a rigid social norm: male presence is required as a formal, almost bureaucratic prerequisite. And yet that “contractual” figure ends up offering a quality of listening and continuity that the original family structure could not provide. The paradox is evident: what is born as simulation proves more attentive and engaged than what society defines as authentic. 

The question thus becomes conceptual: what is more authentic? A bond grounded in biological ties yet emptied of responsibility, or a relationship openly fictitious that nonetheless produces attention, presence, and care? 

The film suggests that familial reality, often idealized, is sometimes more fragile, more contrived, and more illusory than a consciously artificial construction. The “real” families portrayed in the narrative appear cracked by silences, misunderstandings, and betrayed expectations. Conversely, within contractual fiction a paradoxical clarity emerges: we know we are acting, and precisely for that reason we strive to be worthy of the role. 

There is here a radical intuition: identity itself is a form of performance. Each day we enact roles — child, mother, colleague, partner — without questioning their authenticity. Rental Family makes explicit what normally remains implicit: social life is a theater in which adherence to a role can be more or less conscious. 

Fiction, therefore, is not necessarily deception. It can become a device of care. It can fill absences that reality itself cannot. In an era in which isolation grows despite hyperconnection, the film invites us to consider an uncomfortable possibility: perhaps human beings need not abstract truths so much as meaningful emotional experiences, even when constructed. 

Although the film adopts a visual and narrative grammar that appears ostensibly mainstream — linear in development, accessible in tone, emotionally calibrated for a broad audience — the conceptual core that runs through it is anything but simple. Beneath the surface of an orderly narrative unfolds a sophisticated reflection on identity as performance and on relationships as symbolic constructions. This is not entirely unexplored terrain: cinema has already interrogated emotional substitution and the simulation of bonds in more radical and unsettling forms, as in Noriko’s Dinner Table by Sion Sono, where the “rental family” intersects with sectarian drifts and an unsettling dissolution of the self, or in Alps by Yorgos Lanthimos, which explores the substitution of the deceased through a cold and disquieting staging.

Compared to these works, Rental Family chooses a less extreme path but no less problematic: it softens formal harshness to make accessible a question that remains ontologically vertiginous — to what extent can fiction become authentic experience, and how much is authenticity itself already, at its core, a form of shared interpretation? 

The question that lingers is radical: are reality and fiction truly opposites, or do they intertwine until they become interchangeable? If a simulated presence alleviates genuine suffering, is it still simulation, or is it already a form of relationship? 

Rental Family prefers to dwell within ambiguity. It leaves us with the idea that, at times, illusion is not an escape from reality but a device for survival. 

Fiction is a truth that waits.
— Jean Cocteau