Family Romance, LLC

Name: Family Romance, LLC
Genre: Drama
Released: July 3, 2020
Duration: 89 min
Rating: 68
Cast: Ishii Yuichi, Mahiro Tanimoto

2020

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Generally favorable reviews based on 17 Critic Reviews

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Movie Details & Credits

MUBI | Release Date (Streaming): July 3, 2020 | Not Rated

Starring: Ishii Yuichi, Mahiro Tanimoto

Summary: Love is a business at Family Romance, a company that rents human stand-ins for any occasion. Founder Yuichi Ishii helps make his clients’ dreams come true. But when the mother of 12-year-old Mahiro hires Ishii to impersonate her missing father, the line between acting and reality threatens to blur.

Director: Werner Herzog

Genre(s): Drama

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 89 min

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Critic Reviews

Liam Lacey

Jul 8, 2020

In the current moment, with our wary physical distancing and awkward artificial socializing, Family Romance LLC’s gaze into the uncanny valley absolutely chimes with the times. Read full review

Glenn Kenny

Jul 2, 2020

In many of Herzog’s nonfiction films, the director himself is a defining presence. One understands why he wanted to stay behind the camera and off the soundtrack here. This wrinkle in modern social life is best taken in without the mitigation of overt distancing. Read full review

Eurico de Barros

Aug 24, 2020

Is Family Romance, LLC a docudrama? A meta-doc? Staged reality? However you define it, it’s enthralling, unsettling and typically Herzogian. Read full review

Steve Pond

May 22, 2019

A curious little meditation on the extent to which humans will go to make connections, and on the commodification of everything up to and including love, it is a fascinating film that will never be confused with one of Herzog’s major works. But it nonetheless has moments of subtle and quintessentially Herzogian rhapsody. Read full review

IndieWire Eric Kohn

May 22, 2019

While the movie’s rough production values and meandering plot never quite gel, Family Romance, LLC is a fascinating convergence of filmmaker and subject, providing the rare opportunity for Herzog to bury his observations in the material at hand. Read full review

Christopher Machell

Jul 1, 2020

Herzog doesn’t quite hit the mark here: Family Romance’s denouement is certainly moving but its depiction of Ishii’s emotional conflict is undercooked and perhaps even a little trite. Nevertheless, on a formal level, it’s a fascinating study of the artifice of the genre, a deconstruction of the comforting contract between artist and viewer that guides us towards a particular kind of emotional or intellectual engagement. Read full review

A.A. Dowd

Jul 2, 2020

Conversely, a more straightforward documentary might address the bigger questions Herzog barely grazes in fictionalization. Family Romance, LLC straddles the line between the two tacts and finds no ecstatic truth there. Read full review

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Mauro_Lanari

Oct 31, 2021

(Mauro Lanari)
Dreams and desires realized literally at any cost, therefore paying a special service company whose performers collide with the double limit of Eros and Thanatos. A not very empathic and emotional film that, by retaliation, has produced an excess of exegetical readings.

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