Producers: Eddie Vaisman, Julia Lebedev, Hikari and Shin Yamaguchi   Director: Hikari   Screenplay: Hikari and Stephen Blahut   Cast: Brendan Fraser, Takehiro Hira, Mari Yamamoto, Akira Emoto, Shannon Gorman, Shino Shinozaki, Kimura Bun, Sei Matobu and Misato Morita    Distributor: Searchlight Pictures

Grade: C+

Can a movie be just too nice?  It’s a question raised by Hikari’s sweet but rather sappy fable about an expatriate American in Japan who becomes an employee of a business that provides actors to impersonate people—mostly relatives—for situations where their presence is required by the clients.  The initial chapters are amusing, if lightweight, and in the latter stages the plot is at first rather touching.  But in the last half hour the assault on the tear ducts grows overwrought, and the film becomes cloying and maudlin as Philip Vandarploeug (Brendan Fraser) is emotionally drawn into the lives of those who hire him beyond what Shinji (Takehiro Hira), the owner of Rental Family, as the operation is called, expects or desires, resulting in multiple crises that must be resolved in an upbeat fashion.

Philip has been living in Japan for seven years, but his fame there still rests on an embarrassing toothpaste commercial, so he responds to an ad for someone to play a “sad American.”  When he shows up, late, he’s seated among the mourners at a funeral and is shocked when the dead man suddenly rises from the coffin.  The entire scene has been arranged by Shinji as a morale booster for the “dead” man.  Shinji tells Philip to come to the firm’s office, as he might need an American actor from time to time.

And he does.  Philip is unsettled by his next assignment, however, playing the groom in a fake wedding ordered by Yoshie (Misato Morita) to satisfy her parents before she goes off with her lover, another woman.  But Shinji assures him that they’re performing a real service to people in desperate need. 

That leads to the two cases that draw Philip in too deeply for comfort.  In one he’s to act as the father that mixed race child Mia Kawasaki (Shannon Gorman) has never met.  Mia’s mother Hitomi (Shino Shinozaki) has hired him to assume the role as part of her plan to win Mia a place at a prestigious school.  The problem, of course, is that he develops a paternal feeling toward the girl, and she comes to believe he really is her father. 

The second case involves elderly actor Kikuo Hasegawa (Akira Emoto), who’s suffering the onset of dementia.  His daughter Masami (Sei Matobu) hires him to impersonate a journalist desiring to interview her father about his career, but Philip, who admits that he failed to go back to America for his own father’s funeral, becomes emotionally invested in Kikuo’s life. He eventually helps the old gentleman fulfill his dream of revisiting the home village he’s avoided for years.  In the process, however, Philip could face a charge of kidnapping.

The upshot is a double dose of treacle in the plot’s resolution.  Mia and Philip have a heart-to-heart talk that keeps them both close, but with an acceptance of their real relationship as friends.  And the unauthorized visit to Kikuo’s birthplace not only brings the old man the closure he’s long needed, but allows Philip to come to terms with his own feelings of guilt.  The legal ramifications, moreover, offer proof of how protective the company’s workers—not just Shinji but his other employees, Aiko (Mari Yamamoto) and Kota (Kimura Bun)—have become of their new colleague.  And the resolution allows for some tweaks in company policy that free Aiko from a subterfuge she’s found uncomfortable to play.

One can imagine an approach to this curious Japanese business that would have been edgier, if not positively cynical.  (Think of something akin to “The Apartment.”)  One can glimpse what might have been in a late revelation about Shinji’s life outside the office. 

But Hikari is not interested in that route.  She’s content to fashion “Rental Family” as a comfortable, and comforting, comedy-drama, and it succeeds on that unchallenging basis.  It’s fortunate in its cast.  Hira and Yamamoto bring some welcome bite to the proceedings, and Bun is an agreeable comic foil.  Emoto is genuinely affecting as a man with something painful on his conscience, and Gorman captures both little Mia’s wariness and her vulnerability. 

Fraser, on the other hand, is hardly tested by his role.  He brings his lumpy charm to Philip, and the shambling sense of uncertainty works well enough for most of the picture.  Toward the close, however, he overdoes things, scrunching up his face in exaggerated discomfort as the character finds himself inevitably drawn to feel what the people he’s playing would.  He’s simply trying too hard.

The movie does, however, evoke the Japanese milieu nicely; the sequences set in the lush countryside of Kikuo’s rural village are particularly lovely.  Credit goes not only to Hikari but to production designers Norihiro Isoda and Masako Takayama, costumer Meg Mochizuki and cinematographer Takuro Ishizaka.  Alan Baumgarten and Thomas A. Krueger bring appropriate smoothness to the piece with their unhurried editing, and the score by Jónsi and Alex Somers captures the mood.

“Rental Family” is amiable, but by the close so manipulative that you might feel your heartstrings strained by all the tugging.                 

Producers: Todd Lieberman, Laura Fischer and Paul Feig   Director: Paul Feig   Screenplay: Rebecca Sonnenshine   Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Sydney Sweeney, Brandon Sklenar, Michele Morrone, Elizabeth Perkins, Indiana Elle, Amanda Joy Erickson, Sarah Cooper, Megan Ferguson, Ellen Tamaki, Mark Grossman, Sophia Bunnell and Hannah Cruz   Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: C+

There’s nothing wrong with attempting a lurid thriller of the sort that proliferated in the eighties and nineties, but Paul Feig’s adaptation of Freida McFadden’s 2022 bestseller seems less a homage than a parody of them.  “The Housemaid” has twists aplenty (as well as some stomach-churning nastiness), but it’s all played so archly that it’s difficult not to giggle over the goings-on.  Since Feig specializes in comedy, sometimes of a darker sort (see “A Simple Favor” and its inferior sequel), one suspects that’s the reaction he’s seeking, but by the close some might be too nauseated to go along.  You have to be in the mood for some really over-the-top empowerment trash to enjoy this gonzo piece, but if you are, it should be your cup of sour tea.

The plot focuses on Millie Calloway (Sydney Sweeney), a frazzled young woman who applies for a housemaid’s position with the Winchesters, a wealthy couple on Long Island.  She’s greeted enthusiastically by Nina (Amanda Seyfried), who shows her around the expensive house designed by her husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) and is impressed by her intelligence and impressive résumé.  But it’s quickly revealed that the CV is a fraud: Millie’s an ex-con (the exact nature of her crime disclosed late in the story) whose parole requires her to find and hold onto a job, and at the moment she’s homeless and sleeping in her car.

She’s surprised when Nina calls to tell her she’s hired, and neither the warning of gloomy groundskeeper Enzo (Michele Morrone) nor the hostility of the couple’s adolescent daughter Cece (Indiana Elle) deters her from accepting the position.  She’s even willing to endure the brusque disdain of Nina’s snooty mother-in-law Evelyn (Elizabeth Perkins), since Andrew is nice and accommodating.  Millie is immediately ensconced in an attic room up a spiral staircase and a further long flight of stairs, one of those crannies with a triangular window high on the wall and virtually inaccessible. 

But matters change when Nina suddenly turns into a screaming, demanding harpy, berating Millie for sloppiness and ineptitude; eventually she even works to get the girl into legal trouble—loaning her the family car, for example, and then reporting it stolen.  Solicitous Andrew unfailingly smooths things over and develops a friendly concern for Millie.  Other wives in the area confide to Millie that Nina is known to be psychologically unstable and has spent time in an institution after a particularly horrible episode; they see Andrew as a saint for tolerating her and taking such good care of a child that’s not biologically his.    

One day when Nina’s away with Cece, Andrew suggests that he and Millie use a pair of non-refundable Broadway theatre tickets that Nina claims Millie had ordered for the wrong night.  They drive to the city, see the show, enjoy dinner and, when Andrew decides it’s too late to drive back home, take rooms in a hotel.  It’s not an uneventful night, to de decorous about what happens, and when Nina finds out and goes ballistic, Andrew must choose between the two women.

Where “The Housemaid” goes from this point won’t be revealed here; it’s practically impossible to say anything without spoilers.  Suffice it to point out that violence that occurs on the page is less palatable when it’s shown on the screen, and that the ending, while faithful to the book, is predictably made much more florid and frantic.

This is the stuff of pulp, not high drama, and Feig knows the lowbrow-tone-in-tony-surroundings he’s going after and, with ample support from costumer Renée Ehrlich Kalfus, production designer Elizabeth Jones and cinematographer John Schwartzman, he nails it.   Part of a viewer’s pleasure lies not so much in guessing the plot twists but in anticipating not how but when something planted early on is going to come back as part of the puzzle: Jones’s marvelous spiral staircase, for instance, is bound to dominate a set-piece, and does, and when Evelyn hands over her precious heritage china to Andrew’s care, you know it’s bound to get smashed somewhere down the line. The movie tries one’s patience when it goes over the two-hour line, but Brent White’s editing is good at creepy moodiness even in brightly-lit places, and Theodore Shapiro’s score adds to it.

The cast understand what’s expected of them too, and respond enthusiastically.  Seyfried’s Nina is absolutely bonkers—or is she?—while Sweeney’s Millie is mousy and compliant—or is she scheming and hard-nosed?  As for Sklenar, he just might remind you of Patrick Bergin, if you’ve ever seen that actor’s 1991 movie with Julia Roberts.  Among the rest Morrone offers a penetrating monitory stare, Perkins is exquisitely glacial as Andrew’s haughty mother, and Elle is a convincingly surly kid.

“The Housemaid” isn’t much, but it scales the low bar it’s set for itself with slick expertise.