By Mr Hull's Movie Guides
Watch the Trailer
Why Watch This Movie With Your Students
Here's what your students naturally take away from the movie, whether through themes, values, ideas, or perspectives.
🎭 A story built around identity and performance. Phillip is an actor paid to be someone else. The movie raises genuine questions about who we are when we play a role, whether performed kindness has real value, and what it means to connect with someone even under false pretences. These are ideas older students find genuinely compelling.
🤝 Empathy as the engine of the plot. Each client Phillip meets needs something different from him. Watching him adapt, listen, and eventually care about each person gives students a model of empathy in action rather than just a theme to identify. This maps directly onto SEL frameworks around self-awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.
🏢 Based on a real phenomenon. Rental family agencies actually exist in Japan. There are currently around 300 of them, where professional actors are hired to attend weddings, funerals, and family events, or simply to provide companionship. Knowing this is real changes how students engage with the movie entirely, and opens up rich discussion about modern society, loneliness, and cultural pressure.
🌏 A window into Japanese culture. The movie is set entirely in Tokyo and features a mostly Japanese cast and crew. Customs around weddings, funerals, food, and social norms are woven throughout. For Social Studies teachers, this is genuine cultural content rather than a backdrop.
💬 Moral complexity worth exploring. The movie's central question is whether a lie can be a loving act. It is a genuine philosophical problem with no clean resolution, and the kind of question that generates real debate in a classroom long after the lesson is over.
🪞 An actor who has lost himself finding meaning in other people's stories. Phillip is professionally skilled at performing emotion he does not feel. Watching that gradually change as his clients become real to him is the quiet emotional arc at the centre of the movie. Students who notice it happening engage with it on a completely different level.
🧓 Themes that connect to real life. Loneliness, purpose, family, and the need for human connection are not abstract for older students. The movie handles these themes honestly and without sentimentality, which makes it feel relevant rather than preachy.
Age Suitability and Content
This movie is rated PG-13.
📋 A free editable parent permission slip is available for this movie. It explains the educational benefits of watching movies in class and includes a space for parental consent. → Download Free Permission Slip on TpT (Free resource)
⚠️ Things to be aware of:
- Implied non-graphic sexual content: a man and a female sex worker are shown in bed and in a bath together, covered throughout
- An exotic dancer is shown posing suggestively on a stage
- Occasional strong language including s--t and goddamn
- Adults drink beer, sake, champagne, and liquor throughout
- A hard slap that leaves a bruise
- A character is hospitalised
- Themes of loneliness, dementia, and family estrangement, handled with care
How My Movie Guide Helps You Teach It
📚 English Language Arts Teachers. Three differentiated comprehension question sets give you flexibility across ability levels. The storyboard and synopsis tasks develop sequencing and summarising skills. The creative writing section asks students to build a character profile from a client brief and then write a script for Phillip's first meeting with that client. It is structured, imaginative, and produces writing that is individual to each student.
🗣️ ESL and ELL Teachers. The multiple-choice question set works well with language learners, keeping the comprehension focus without the writing demand of the full-sentence sets. The script-writing task is also well suited to ESL students working in pairs or small groups, with the option to perform scenes rather than just write them.
🌐 Social Studies Teachers. Rental Family is built around a real Japanese cultural phenomenon, and the movie depicts authentic customs around weddings, funerals, food, and social expectations throughout. The existence of rental family agencies (around 300 currently operating in Japan) reflects specific social pressures around family, shame, and appearances that connect directly to wider discussions about culture, community, and how different societies respond to loneliness. The comprehension questions keep students accountable during the movie and provide a record of engagement.
🎬 Substitute Teachers and Cover Lessons. The guide includes clear teacher directions and organised materials. Answer keys are included for all comprehension question sets. A substitute can hand out the materials and manage the session without having seen the movie.
🏠 Homeschool Parents. Rental Family is the kind of movie that opens up real conversation between a parent and a teenager. The themes around identity, honesty, purpose, and human connection are rich enough to anchor a discussion that goes well beyond the movie itself. The guide gives that conversation a structured starting point.
🎭 Theater Teachers. The script-writing task in Part 3 of the guide is a natural drama activity. Students create a character profile for Phillip based on a client brief, write the script of their first meeting, and can then perform it in groups. The rental family premise gives the task a clear dramatic situation with real built-in tension: a stranger playing a role for someone who needs to believe it is real. No additional planning is required beyond what is already in the guide.
💙 SEL Teachers. Rental Family handles Social Emotional Learning themes with real depth. Empathy, self-awareness, integrity, loneliness, purpose, and the ethics of honesty are all central to the story rather than incidental to it. The movie models what it looks like to genuinely listen to and care about another person, and the comprehension questions track those moments through the narrative. For SEL-focused classrooms, this is a movie that does the work naturally.
🌟 Supporting All Learners Movie guides can be a wonderfully calm fit for students with autism, learning difficulties, and mild to severe disabilities. The structured format gives every student a clear purpose during viewing, easing uncertainty and allowing them to engage at their own pace. If you teach in a special education or learning support setting, you may find this guide a gentle and practical resource. Find out more about why movies work for diverse learners.
This guide is built around the movie's narrative, themes, and creative premise. It is not tied to specific subject-area curriculum standards. For science or social studies teachers using the movie for accountability purposes, the comprehension questions will keep students engaged and give them something to submit, but the guide is not designed as subject-specific curriculum content.
What's Inside the Guide
This is a 15-page classroom-ready resource.
Part 1: Differentiated Comprehension Questions
Three complete question sets covering the movie in chronological order. The first includes 45 full-sentence questions tracking the movie from beginning to end. The second is a 30-question version with 15 questions removed from the 45-question set. The third is a 30-question multiple-choice set with three options per question, suitable for younger students or language learners. Answer keys are included for all three sets.
Part 2: Storyboard and Synopsis
Students illustrate and describe nine key scenes from the movie, covering the beginning, middle, and end. Each panel includes space for a drawing and a short description of the main idea it represents. Using their completed storyboard as a guide, students then write a synopsis of the movie in their own words.
Part 3: Creative Writing
Students take on the role of an employee at the rental family agency who receives a call from a new client. They record key details about the client's situation and the role required, then create a character profile for Phillip based on those needs. They then write a short script showing Phillip meeting the client and performing the role. This section can also be used as a drama activity, with students performing their scripts in groups.
How These Guides Work: From Movie to Lesson
A movie is not a break from learning. It reaches students through sight, sound, and story at once, engaging the brain in ways text alone does not, and the structured work around it is what turns the viewing into a genuine lesson. You can read the research behind this on the Why Movies Work page.
- A Teacher Notes and General Directions page opens the guide with a brief overview of everything inside: what the movie is about, then each part of the guide in order with a short description of what it entails. You know what to expect from the whole resource before you hand out a single page, so you can pick up the guide cold and teach it the same day.
- Answer keys are included for the comprehension question sets, so grading is quick and you are not rewatching the movie to check answers.
- Print and go: classroom ready, with no additional preparation needed. Print one the morning you need it and the lesson is ready.
- Substitute and first-timer friendly. A guide can be handed to a substitute or picked up by a teacher covering the topic for the first time. Nobody running the session needs to have seen the movie.
- Differentiated comprehension sets. Most guides include two or three question sets at different difficulty levels, and most include a multiple-choice option that works well for ESL and ELL students. One class set covers your strongest readers, your strugglers, and your language learners without separate prep.
- Activities that go beyond recall. Each guide includes structured activities that ask students to engage with the movie, not just watch it, ranging from creative and written tasks to discussion and critical thinking questions depending on the guide. That variety matters in a mixed classroom: a student who freezes on a written question set may show real understanding through a drawing or a creative task, and a confident writer gets room to go beyond recall. For the teacher, it turns a movie session into work that can actually be assessed: comprehension questions show whether students followed the plot, and the activities beyond them show whether they understood it.
