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 it:
🎭 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.
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.
Drama 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.
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.
What Makes This Guide Different
Rental Family is not a straightforward movie to teach, and this guide does not try to make it simple. The comprehension questions follow the story in order and track both the external events and the internal shifts in how Phillip sees his work and himself. Students who work through the questions properly come away with a nuanced understanding of the movie rather than a surface-level summary. For any teacher showing this movie, the comprehension questions alone give students a clear purpose while watching and something concrete to submit afterwards.
The creative writing section is the part of this guide that sets it apart. The rental family premise is inherently dramatic. A stranger is hired to play a role in your life, and the task asks students to inhabit that world from the inside. They are not writing about the movie; they are writing within its logic. The character profile and script tasks produce genuinely different responses from every student, and the scripts can be performed as a drama activity with no additional preparation needed.
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