WHEN I saw the trailer for the film Rental Family it sounded so absurd that I immediately knew I had to watch it. Brendan Fraser plays Phillip, an actor living in Japan, who plays a companion to whoever hires him. He plays a dad for hire, a husband to a gay woman, a journalist recording an interview of a famed, elderly actor. You pay him, he shows up, he performs the part, he leaves.

Who would do such a thing? Who would need such a thing? And then you watch the film and realise — of course, people would. Of course, they do.

Phillip isn’t a charlatan. He’s good at what he does, maybe too good. He remembers details about the lives he temporarily inhabits. He shows up on time. He doesn’t judge. Whatever his role, what matters is the performance of connection, the theatre of intimacy. Everyone believes it. Maybe even his clients do.

I kept thinking: is this so different from what we already do?

We are disappearing from each other’s lives.

We live in an era of curated connection. We rent attention through likes and comments. We subscribe to parasocial relationships with influencers who feel like friends but would never recognise us in a crowd. We pay for therapy because we have no one else to talk to, which isn’t a criticism of therapy but an observation about the shrinking of informal support systems. The hairdresser, the neighbour, the friend you could call at 2am — we’re disappearing from each other’s lives.

Technology promised to connect us but, instead, isolated us in ways we’re only beginning to understand. We have thousands of ‘friends’ online but no one to help us move house. We can video call anyone anywhere, but we’re lonelier than ever. Studies keep confirming this — social isolation is rising, particularly among young people who’ve grown up with smartphones as appendages. The pandemic accelerated what was already happening. We learned we could survive without physical proximity and now we’re stuck in that survival mode, unsure how to return to a world that requires us to show up.

So why wouldn’t you rent a companion? Why wouldn’t you pay someone to sit across from you at dinner, to laugh at your jokes, to perform the warmth you’re not getting anywhere else? It’s transactional but at least it’s honest. At least you know what you’re getting. There’s no ghosting, no wondering if they really like you, no anxiety about being too much or not enough. You pay, they perform, everyone understands the terms.

The film doesn’t mock its characters for using this service. If anything, it’s tender towards them. There’s the gay woman who needs a husband for appearance’s sake. The daughter who rents Philip for her elderly actor father who just wants someone to listen to his stories. They aren’t pathetic. They’re just lonely. And loneliness, the film suggests, isn’t a personal failing — it’s a social one.

But here’s what haunts me: what happens when we accept that connection can be commodified? What happens when we stop trying to build real relationships because we can simply purchase their imitations? Does the woman with the rented husband stop looking for authentic acceptance? Does the elderly actor give up trying to reconnect with real friends?

I think about this in our context, where family structures are already under strain. Joint families are breaking. The elderly are increasingly isolated. Young people are struggling to find partners. We’re fracturing in ways that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. My grandparents never knew loneliness the way people do now because they were never alone — for better and worse, they were always surrounded by fa-mily, neighbours, noise.

What we’ve gai-ned in privacy and autonomy, we’ve lost in connection. And I don’t think we’ve figured out how to balance that equation. We want independence but we also want someone to notice when we haven’t left the house in three days. We want space but we also want to matter to someone. Technology promised to solve this but it can’t manufacture the kind of mattering that requires showing up, being inconvenienced, caring even when it’s not convenient.

The danger isn’t that services like Rental Family will become real — they probably already exist in some form. The danger is that we’ll accept them as normal, as inevitable, as just another subscription in a life full of subscriptions. That we’ll forget what it feels like to be known without performing, to be loved without transaction, to belong somewhere without paying for access.

Maybe the film isn’t about a dystopian future. Maybe it’s about recognising what we’re already losing, one rented moment at a time. Though if we’re honest, we have been living with rented leadership long enough to know exactly how hollow it feels. At least a rental family might actually show up when you need them.

The writer is a former instructor of journalism.

X: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, February 1st, 2026