@media_marshall Published Feb. 18, 2026, 11:00 a.m. ET Where to Stream: Alps Powered by Reelgood More On: yorgos lanthimos ‘Bugonia’ Ending Explained: The Meaning Behind the Emma Stone Movie Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Bugonia’ on Peacock, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Latest Emma Stone-Led Foray Into Hopelessness Decider’s 17 Best Movies Of 2025 New Movies on Streaming: ‘Bugonia,’ ‘Regretting You’ + More After what passes for a strong box office run in the indie world these days ($10 million domestic gross), Hikari’s Rental Family now heads to Hulu. It’s here that the film will almost certainly find its biggest audience, in no small part because a streaming tile featuring the key art of Brendan Fraser looming large over Japanese commuters is just the kind of thing that grabs eyeballs on streaming.
There’s truth in advertising for the fish-out-of-water tale such an image portends. Rental Family follows Fraser’s Phillip Vanderploeg, a struggling American actor in Tokyo who eventually finds steady employment doing a most unusual style of performance. While it might seem like something out of a Black Mirror episode, the rental family agency for which he becomes a day player is a real industry in Japan. Phillip becomes their “token white guy” and parachutes into various clients’ lives to play a missing part. These roles range from being the beard for a lesbian couple, pretending to be a long-absent father to help a young child get into private school, and masquerading as a journalist to engage a dementia-addled aging man.
The very concept of turning human emotional presence into a commodity for purchase raises countless interesting dynamics. Rental Family circles questions fundamental to the value of art and acting itself. Can imagination supplant reality? Is it possible for an act of deception to foster true illumination? Does artificiality suffice as a means to eventually achieve authenticity?
Hikari’s film, co-written with Stephen Blahut, only tackles these dichotomies with surface-level treatments. Rental Family operates under the mistaken assumption that getting into the knotty complexities of Phillip’s work might undermine his journey toward emotional catharsis. She’s committed to maintaining the feel-good vibes of the film at the expense of fully exploring the subject matter.
For those desiring a film that’s unafraid of drawing blood by embracing the thorniness of the topic, a great subsequent – or substituted – watch would be Yorgos Lanthimos’ Alps. Back before the Greek director became the most improbable Academy stalwart — see Poor Things, see this year’s Bugonia — this final film made in his home country wholeheartedly embraced the absurdity and agony of outsourcing a stand-in.
Like Lanthimos’ better-known English-language work, Alps takes an oblique approach to its story and themes rather than depicting reality head-on. In this original story, co-written with longtime partner Efthymis Fillipou, an intrepid entrepreneurial group comes together to offer themselves as “substitutes” for the recently departed to help their families grieve and move on. They’ll rebuild their imitation of the deceased from small details, both physical (like wearing their tennis shoes) and psychological (such as knowing their favorite actor was Jude Law).
Ask anyone who’s experienced a loss, and they will profess that mourning is anything but a straight line. Alps cuts a similarly jagged path across this rocky emotional terrain, especially through the most prominent gig that the group lands. A hospital nurse known as “Monte Rosa” (Angeliki Papoulia) sells her services to replace a teenage tennis player, whom she treats following a car crash that leaves the young woman in critical condition. Monte Rosa declines to make her troupe aware of this substitution, however, and begins to grow her role within the family as they process her illness and absence.
Unlike Phillip, whose trajectory bends in the direction of enlightenment, Monte Rosa experiences increasing chaos as the line blurs between herself and her character. Her fastidious recreation even goes as far as reliving specific moments from the tennis player’s life with the dead girl’s father and boyfriend. This technique does not bring the intended closure from revisiting these scenes with the benefit of perspective. Instead, it only invites more confusion. Monte Rosa may start by playing a part, but that part soon plays her.
Yet another key distinguishing facet that makes Alps a more probing film is that Lanthimos is just as interested in the twisted psychology of the people hiring the actors, too. Unlike in Rental Family, these clients are active participants in constructing and negotiating the boundaries of these simulated exercises. Some Alps customers, like a widowed lamp shop owner, even have their ideas down to the exact word they want to hear expressed in sexual bliss.
Each attempt to maximize Alps’ services only serves to highlight the futility of their offering. There is no script for the messiness of human emotion. No one can optimize their way out of grief or hack emotion. It’s an inexplicable process that resists any attempts to be compartmentalized into a capitalistic logic. When it comes to grappling with the absence of someone who was once there, as Robert Frost once wrote, “the only way out is through.”
Lanthimos understands the ridiculousness of finding a market solution for a problem deep in the soul. His drolly satirical lens delights in finding the more banal areas where irrationality masquerades as logic in everyday life, such as the pathetic platitudes shared to make a passing more palatable. Alps’ take on emotional surrogacy may have the spirit of far-flung dystopian science fiction, but it’s all the more searing and soulful because Lanthimos roots the film so firmly in a recognizable reality.
His and Fillipou’s script resists imposing a heavy-handed structure, melodramatic or otherwise, on the collection of droll observations strewn across Alps. While the acting style can seem affected to the point of seeming borderline robotic, the unvarnished moments of tender humanity that manage to penetrate these facades are all the more powerful as a result. He relishes the mystery of the subtext that gets spoken loudly by the characters of Rental Family, sublimating it into revelatory abstraction.
The perceived chilliness of Lanthimos is not a provocation, but rather an invitation to go deeper into his films – and into ourselves. We may not find a resolution to the impossible questions raised. But we can locate something better: the resolve to persevere through the systems that sand down untidy emotions only to sell them to us as a luxury good.
Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, The Playlist and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.
