Film reviews: Rental Family | The Voice of Hind Rajab
Starring Brendan Fraser as an underemployed actor hired to pretend to be a young girl’s father, Rental Family is a sentimental affair, writes Alistair Harkness
Rental Family (12A) ★★
The Voice of Hind Rajab (15) ★★★★
Having already been the source for a partially debunked New Yorker article and a subsequent Werner Herzog docudrama (Family Romance LLC), the Japanese practice of hiring actors to pretend to be family members gets a sentimental treatment in Rental Family, a fairly innocuous vehicle for Oscar-winner Brendan Fraser.
He plays Phillip, an underemployed Tokyo-based American actor who’s hired by the titular agency to play various in-real-life roles, among them the father to a young biracial girl (Shannon Gorma) whose mother is trying to get her into a good school.
READ MORE: Film reviews: Hamnet | Giant
It’s this role that has the most profound effect on Philip as his ability to play caring dad to a girl who doesn’t know the truth simultaneously exposes a longing in his own life and a queasy dilemma the film would rather you not think too hard about.
What do you say about The Voice of Hind Rajab? That it’s emotionally shattering? Undeniably powerful? That it raises intriguing ethical questions? All of the above?
Taking the real-life audio recordings of a six-year-old Palestinian girl’s desperate pleas for help and incorporating them into a tense drama about the doomed efforts of the emergency dispatchers who tried to co-ordinate her rescue from a car shelled by the Israeli Defence Forces as her family tried to flee Gaza City in early 2024, director Kaouther Ben Hania’s urgent, ripped-from-the-headlines film certainly succeeds in its primary goal of dramatising the terrible human cost of the conflict.
And maybe that’s all that needs to be said about it. The artful way Ben Hania later draws attention to its status as a film may offer plenty of additional scope for discussing its cinematic merits, but it’s the film’s immediate and primal ability to connect audiences directly to the atrocity it’s exploring that justifies its existence.
Both films are in cinemas from Friday
The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today
Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.